


Where Will You Go?

by eliddell



Category: Suikoden III
Genre: Adventure, Alcohol Abuse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-20 08:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 69,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eliddell/pseuds/eliddell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been some time since the events of Suikoden III, and Geddoe and the rest of SFDF Unit 12 have settled back into their normal routine. Then Bishop Sasarai shows up in Caleria, incognito and trailing operatives from the Howling Voice Guild, and their lives are turned upside-down once again as they are forced to journey back into Geddoe's past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of several older stories that I never circulated all that widely—I believe it was completed in late 2006. There are a few rough spots in the prose, but I'm not likely to fix them at this late date. Sorry if that bothers anyone.
> 
> For the purposes of this story, assume that Hugo got the True Fire Rune (there are some bits in the game that suggest he's the intended recipient, anyway).
> 
> Thanks to Death Quaker for beta reading this, back in the day.
> 
> Disclaimer: Of _course_ Suikoden III isn't mine! One person working alone couldn't possibly produce the code, the story, _and_ all of the artwork assets necessary for a game of that size. It just isn't practical.

"A blonde? _Here?_ You've been drinking too much of this paint thinner." 

"Hey, old man, I swear—" 

I tuned the rest of the conversation out, knowing that the two of them would finish arguing about the time the Spotted Goat Inn and Tavern started serving imported Grasslands beer at reasonable prices instead of the cheap and nasty Calerian wine we were all drinking. Well, okay, the argument would end when Ace either left the table to sniff after another woman or planted himself face down in his sea of empties—he never could hold his liquor as well as Joker. 

Beside me, Jacques was well on his way toward the face-planting stage, slumped in his chair looking out at the world through glazed and heavy-lidded eyes. Poor bastard. We were supposedly here to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, but he hadn't bargained with Ace's idea of what a "celebration" was. Of course, he might just have thought Ace was too cheap to pay not just for the vodka to spike his orange juice with, but to bribe the guy behind the bar to do it on the sly. I might have bailed him out, but if in nearly four years, he hadn't learned to be careful of Ace, he deserved the hangover. 

Queen and Aila had given up on us menfolk completely about half an hour ago and moved to another table, where they were whispering and giggling. Hearing Queen giggle is quite an experience, but then she was drinking the same rotgut as the rest of us longtime members of SFDF Unit Twelve. Fortunately for the rest of us, Aila still preferred soda, though— there'd still be one sober person in the place to help Jacques, Joker and Queen get to bed. 

Just another normal evening on the ground floor of the Spotted Goat—or at least, it was until _he_ walked in. 

He didn't really look like much without his blue uniform—just a brown-haired kid who might have been about Jacques' age—but I make a point of remembering faces. It's important in our line of work. The question was, what was Bishop Sasarai doing out here on the frontier, dressed as an ordinary Second Class Citizen, without even his perpetual hanger-on, Dios? And why was he wearing that uneven strip of leather as a headband? 

Then someone else followed him in the door, and I found myself setting my mug down, very carefully. The stranger was wearing a Calerian headdress, and one of the over-robes some of them used to deal with the chill of the highland night, but his skin tone was wrong and so was his build—I've never seen a Calerian that stocky. And he had an odd way of moving, sort of like he was floating above the floor and just making incidental contact with it now and then to propel himself along. There was something familiar and threatening about that. 

I heaved myself to my feet and started threading my way between tables. It might have been a bit of a reckless thing to do, but, well, we'd been drinking since midafternoon, and while I hadn't had enough to affect my reflexes, I was still pretty well-lubricated. Geese hung heavy at my belt, but I wasn't quite ready to draw her yet and start a panicked stampede for the door. Gods only knew what kind of mess that would result in. 

Then I saw the stranger's hand come out from under his robe holding something metallic, and I knew I'd run out of time. I gestured sharply, invoking the power of the Thunder Rune I carry in my left hand to make the presence of my True Rune less obvious. Really, I'd have preferred to just throw an empty mug or something, but since I'd lost my eye I could never be sure I was going to hit what I was aiming at that way. 

The explosion that followed surprised even me—I mean, lightning _does_ make things go bang, but I'd never seen it splatter a human body all over the walls before. Someone screamed, and I had to knock a couple of people out of my way to get to Sasarai and his ex-pursuer. 

The bishop was splattered with blood, but he didn't seem to have been hurt. The other guy . . . The explosion had blown his right hand to bits and made a big ragged hole in his chest and stomach, so that a loop of intestine spilled out when I kicked him over on his back. The metal thing he'd been holding wasn't in the best of shape either, but there was enough of it left that I could recognize it. _A gun. Howling Voice Guild? Lovely._ It did explain why the way he'd moved had screamed "Threat!" at me, though—last time I'd seen any of those guys, they'd been trying to kill Wyatt, and I'd been in the way. 

"Boss, what the _hell_?" That was Ace announcing his arrival. I was standing in a cleared semi-circle now, with my troop behind me. Even Jacques was there, although from the looks of it, Aila was holding him up. 

"Party's over for tonight," I said. "Get everyone upstairs." The bartender was already marshaling his forces for the cleanup—the Spotted Goat saw at least one death every year, and while this one might have been a little more spectacular than most, the staff wasn't likely to stay stunned for long. Still, we'd have to get out of town early tomorrow, and stay there until everyone had forgotten this, even if no one was likely to do much investigating. Not of me, not on behalf of a stranger . . . assuming that anyone had even figured out what had happened or that I was responsible. 

I touched Joker's shoulder and pointed out Sasarai to him. His eyes widened slightly, and he nodded. Then I led the way into the main part of the inn and up the stairs, secure in the knowledge that our wayward bishop would be coming along even if Joker had to put him in a wrist lock and drag him. 

They were the last ones up the stairs. By that time, the rest of us had already taken over the upstairs sitting room— there had been a couple of people there, but one glare from me and they'd cleared out. I seem to have that effect on people. Maybe it's the eyepatch. 

Queen propped her feet on the table and turned to me expectantly. "So, is someone going to explain what the hell happened down there?" 

"Your captain saved my life." Sasarai seemed awfully calm, I thought, for someone who'd just had a rather narrow escape, and still had bits of someone else spattered all over him. Crystal Valley politics had to be even more cut-throat than I'd thought. 

"He did?" Ace must have been really thoroughly sozzled, because he's not usually so slow on the uptake. 

I held up my hand. Instant silence. "Mind telling us what you're doing here, Bishop—incognito, and with the Howling Voice on your heels?" 

"It's a long story." 

"Maybe I should send downstairs for another round before you start, then," Ace suggested. 

Queen glared at him. "You've had enough already, I think." 

"Shut up, you two—I want to hear this." Joker was still standing by the door, due to a lack of chairs, and looking more sober by the minute. 

"It started not long after the war ended. Well, strictly speaking, I suppose it started a while before that, but it was Hikusaak's disappearance that brought everything to a head, I think." Sasarai stared at the table as he spoke, and now that everything had quieted down a bit, I could see that he looked like hell, and not just because his clothes didn't quite fit and seemed to have been slept in, either. His face was a shade thinner than I remembered, and there were fine lines around his eyes—he looked like he'd aged ten years in the three since we'd seen him last, even though, as the bearer of the True Earth Rune, he shouldn't have been able to age at all. 

"Hikusaak? You mean your High Priest? I thought he'd gone missing a long time ago." Aila tipped her chair back so that she could lean it against the wall. 

"He stopped making public appearances almost two centuries ago," Sasarai corrected, "but up until three years ago, he still appeared before the Bishops' Council from time to time, and sent us letters when he couldn't be there in person. But there's been nothing since shortly after the war, and even that was only a brief note. This is the first time that there's been more than a couple of months between messages. I can't be certain, but I think that . . . certain factions . . . have seen this as an indication that he no longer cares what happens to Harmonia, or to those of us who still support him. Recently, there have been a number of deaths of First Class Citizens. The circumstances have often been somewhat mysterious or ambiguous, but most of them suggest murder, and I . . ." 

"And you got framed for at least one of them," Ace said. "Hey, what're you guys staring at? It's obvious, isn't it?" 

"It's just that you don't normally do such a good job of connecting the dots when you're plastered," Queen said. 

Joker snorted. "I would've said just the opposite—that his brain doesn't normally work all that well because he doesn't lubricate it properly . . ." 

I held up my hand for silence again, and nodded to Sasarai. 

"I was framed, yes," the bishop said. "I assumed that the matter could be quickly cleared up—Dios is normally with me nearly every moment of every day, and thus would be an invaluable witness to the fact that I neither committed these murders, nor had them contracted out—and I allowed myself to be placed under house arrest. However, shortly after that, members of the Howling Voice Guild tried to kill me, and it became obvious that I wasn't meant to live to stand trial. I fled Crystal Valley with Dios, but he was injured in another attack, and we agreed that I was to go on alone. I headed for Caleria with the intention of crossing the pass into the Grasslands and seeking sanctuary with the Flame Champion and the Karaya Clan . . . and then I encountered you downstairs." 

I turned that over in my mind—Karaya Clan, all right, they had let Wyatt hide out from the Howling Voice with them, but I hadn't thought the Sasarai I had met during what was now being called the Second Fire Bringer War would have run away and left an injured friend behind to be killed by the Howling Voice. Then again, he _did_ spend most of his time embroiled in the cutthroat world of politics, and I hadn't known him all that well. _Face it, Geddoe, you're just not as good at judging people's character as you thought you were._

"You think my clan would have accepted you?" Aila asked, eyes flashing. "Karaya don't run away from our enemies— we kill them!" 

"It was that or take ship for Falena," Sasarai said. "I can't fight the Howling Voice alone." 

Okay, I admit it—I have enough curiosity for three normal people when it comes to stuff like why Harmonia's assassin guild would suddenly decide to target a member of the priesthood who was supposed to be giving them orders, even a disgraced one. Besides, I find it's a lot safer to have sources of disruption where I can keep my eye on them, and we were going to have to leave town for a while anyway . . . _and_ I'd never liked the Howling Voice much, and I owed Sasarai a bit of a favour for not spilling the fact that I had the True Lightning Rune to the rest of the Bishops' Council, so . . . "Falena might be your better bet," I said. "The Karaya Clan's still recovering from having their village burned down, and they've gotten a little touchy about outsiders, especially Harmonians. We'll take you with us as far as Vinay del Zexay. You should be able to find a ship there." 

"Thank you, Captain." Well, that's what Sasarai said— everyone else was staring at me, even Jacques, although I doubt he understood what he was looking at. 

"Since this isn't an official mission . . . well, I won't try to disband the unit again," I said, remembering just how well that hadn't worked last time, "but I won't think less of anyone who wants to take a couple of months of vacation somewhere quiet right about now." 

Aila snorted. "Who wants a vacation? This sounds like it might be interesting." 

"And we certainly wouldn't want to risk you forgetting to pick us up on the way back," Queen added. 

"Right," Ace said after half a beat, and stretched. "I'd better get a move on, then—writing up a report on this that Headquarters'll accept is going to take me the rest of the night." 

He was halfway out of his chair when there was a commotion downstairs that made everyone stand up except Sasarai—even Jacques made it to a sort-of-vertical position somehow. I closed my hand on Geese's hilt, and didn't take it off even when the first person climbing the stairs turned out to be someone I knew. 

"Geddoe, what the hell is this?! We just get into town, it's almost the middle of the night, and now we can't get anything to drink because you decided to kill someone in the middle of the only bar in town that doesn't spike the drinks with cockroaches!" 

"Hello, Duke," I said, trying for a neutral tone of voice. 

"'Hello, Duke' my—Wait a minute, who's this?" The red-head squinted at Sasarai, and then his eyes went really wide. "You!" 

_Damn!_ Geese was almost clear of her scabbard when Ace said lazily, "You've met before? Wonder why he didn't join your team, then." 

"Join?" Duke blinked. "Isn't this—" 

Ace grinned and ruffled Sasarai's hair, while I slid Geese quietly back into place. For a moment, the bishop— probably ex-bishop by now, I supposed—looked outraged, but a second later, he'd hidden it. "This is King, our newest trainee. We met him on the way up from Dunan. He had some business to finish up before he met us there, and it was the tail end of that that happened downstairs—sorry 'bout that." 

Duke did his best to circle the pair . . . which wasn't a very good job, given how little space he had to do it in, but he tried. "'King', eh? Wonder how long it's going to take you to collect Two to Ten, so that you'll finally be playing with a full deck?" 

Joker yawned. "Do you mind? We're heading out for Vinay del Zexay tomorrow, and we'd like to get some sleep." 

"Yeah, I guess someone your age would need it. See you in the morning, Geddoe." 

"If you can make it out of bed that early," I replied lazily. Okay, so the whole rivalry thing between Duke's unit and mine should really have been beneath my dignity, but Duke had always kind of annoyed me, and he was too thick-headed to grasp that he was eighty years behind me in terms of experience and would never catch up. 

Apparently he was fresh out of snippy replies, too, because he just gave me a dirty look before starting back down the stairs. It was only when we couldn't hear his heavy footsteps anymore that we all relaxed. 

"Think he bought it?" Ace asked. 

Queen snorted. "Not for a second, but he'll keep quiet. Guess we owe him one. Anyway, Joker's right—we need to get some sleep." 

"Hope you don't mind spending the night on our couch," Joker added to 'King'. 

"You don't have to—" But again, there was that little flash of outrage and distaste, coming and going so quickly that I doubted anyone else had noticed it. Well, a couch in a shared room in a second-rate inn couldn't exactly be what Sasarai was used to. 

"Yes, we do," Joker corrected. "Ace is going to be up all night, the captain always takes that room at the back that's the size of a shoebox, and the girls won't let you in with them. Besides, Jacques and I have the biggest room, and the only couch." 

The size of the back room was less of a consideration for me than the fact that the window opened over the roof of the kitchen and could be used as an exit if you were careful—I'd tested it, oh, at least three times over the years. Other than that, Joker was right. 

"I don't know how I'm ever going to repay you," Sasarai said after a moment. 

"Don't bother." Ace waved his hands expressively. "The captain takes it into his head to do things like this every so often, and the rest of us have learned to humour him." I gave him a nasty look, but Ace is used to my glares . . . and no one takes him all that seriously, anyway. 

The meeting broke up after that, with the understanding that we would all be downstairs and ready to start the month-long trek back to Vinay del Zexay at first light. 

We didn't make it there, though. Not even close. 

It was still dark outside when I woke. Lying there on my back, I tried to figure out _why_ I was awake . . . and smelled smoke. _What?_

Frowning, I heaved myself up into a sitting position and reached for my boots—except for them (and Geese, who was hanging from the bedpost), I'd gone to bed fully clothed. Once I had them on, I grabbed my weapon and the pack that was waiting in the corner and opened the window. 

And closed it again right away, because the heat was nearly singeing my eyebrow off. _Kitchen's on fire. Arson? Too much coincidence if it isn't,_ I decided. 

The door out into the common room was cool, so I kicked it open. Empty. With unpleasant visions of my people having been slaughtered in their beds, I drew Geese and used her hilt to hammer on Ace's door, which still had light spilling from underneath. 

"Who's there?" 

I relaxed a little when I heard his voice . . . but just a little. "The building's on fire. Get your pack and help me get the others moving." 

"Right. I _thought_ I smelled something funny, but I figured it was just the new apprentice they had in the kitchen screwing up tomorrow's bread . . . " 

Queen's and Aila's door was next, but I bypassed it in favour of Joker's, Jacques' . . . and "King"'s. They were the ones I was most worried about—if the fire _had_ been deliberately set, it had to have something to do with Sasarai. 

I pounded twice on the wood, then kicked. The door shot open . . . to reveal Joker standing barefoot beside his bed, the Pale Gate Rune on his forehead glimmering, half-invoked. Sasarai was sitting up on the couch, and even Jacques had managed to prop himself up on one elbow. 

"Trouble?" This wasn't the first time I'd had to come barging into Joker's room in the middle of the night, and he knew the drill. He sniffed the air. "Guess someone's trying to smoke us out. Right. King, help me with Jacques—I doubt he's going to be able to get anywhere very fast on his own." 

Sasarai looked surprised for a moment, then shook his head violently, as though trying to get something out of it. He shrugged and reached for the pair of too-large boots he'd been wearing when he arrived. 

By the time they'd gotten Jacques on his feet, Ace had the girls up, and we all went charging down the steps together in a group . . . and ended up in the middle of chaos. 

There was smoke swirling through the ground floor of the inn, more than there had been upstairs, which struck me as odd. I didn't have much time to think about it, though, because two grappling figures were stumbling towards me out of the dimness. I slashed reflexively with Geese, and one of them went tumbling to the floor. 

The other one was Duke, and he gave me a dirty look. "It would have to be you," he said, voice raspy with smoke. Meanwhile, I was looking down at the corpse, seeing black clothes, a cloth mask that clung wetly to the lower half of the face . . . and a gun. Howling Voice again, and prepared to work in a burning building. _Looks like we didn't get out a moment too soon._

"Outside," I snapped, and grabbed my would-be rival by the arm, propelling him ahead of me. 

"Geddoe, you fool, there's more of them out there!" 

"Then we're going through them." The others were arranging themselves behind me, Queen and Joker to the left and right, with Aila, Jacques, and Sasarai between them and Ace bringing up the rear. Duke glared at me with reddened eyes, but kept moving. 

The front door was shut, but we crashed straight through it and into the plaza outside the inn . . . and straight into another batch of Howling Voice operatives. Eight—no, ten. Or maybe eleven? I wasn't sure I even saw the last figure, short and hanging back in the shadows. I was too busy staying alive . . . and truth be told, I was as angry as hell, too. We hadn't been the only ones staying at the Spotted Goat that night. How many people who weren't involved in this at all were still inside, choking on smoke? 

I ended up back-to-back with Queen, fighting three of the Howling Voice types . . . which soon became two when the first one didn't survive a Soaring Bolt. The other two grimly threw their guns aside and came at us with knives. They were very good and very, very fast, and I had to take a couple of strikes on my armour. I didn't like doing it, though, because the edges of those knifes gleamed balefully green in a way that couldn't just be due to the oddities of the light. 

Aila, Jacques, and Sasarai seemed to have taken shelter inside the market stall that was built up against the wall of the inn, and Ace and Joker and Duke and his people seemed to have fanned out around it. I couldn't stop for a better look, though, because the assassin I was fighting had homed straight in on my weakness, and was constantly attacking my blind side. And I had to treat any attack that came from there as real even if I thought it was a feint; I'd learned that the hard way, many years earlier. 

Then I got lucky—I managed to parry my opponent's blade upwards and slam my free hand into the pit of his stomach, then hit him with another Soaring Bolt in the instant that it took him to recover. That left him kind of doubled over and charred- looking, holding his knife in both hands . . . and then in no hands at all, as I brought Geese down and severed his wrists. Any normal person would have screamed, but this one just glared and tried to kick me. It didn't quite connect, though, and he overbalanced, collapsed, and couldn't get up. I slashed across the side of his throat, just to be sure that he wouldn't be getting up again and kicking me in the back, then turned on my heel and attacked Queen's opponent from the side. With the two of us working together, he lasted . . . oh, maybe five seconds . . . so we both looked around for more. 

"Pull back!" A woman's voice, or a very young man's. I didn't recognize it, and couldn't tell where it was coming from. "Pull back!" 

There were seven of the assassins left—one was on the ground with one of Aila's arrows in his eye—and when they heard that voice, they all started backing away from the semi-circle of fighters in front of the merchant's stall. 

"Let them go," I called when Aila seemed about to jump out and start running after them. I was trying to catch my breath, and Geese was dripping blood on the ground in front of me. Tongues of flame were poking out the windows of the Spotted Goat, and off to the side, someone was starting to organize a bucket brigade. I hoped that everyone inside had gotten out alive. 

"Guess we all made it," Queen said from beside me, voice rough—well, we'd all breathed smoke at some point during this mess. Ace was in the middle of the plaza now, standing beside Elaine and Gau from Duke's Fourteenth Unit, blotting a cut on his face with the back of one hand. Joker was bent over Duke himself, the Flowing Rune on his left hand glowing, while Duke's man Nicolas hovered in the background, watching. And Aila and Sasarai were emerging from behind their wooden barricade, supporting Jacques, who was still only semiconscious. 

I bent down and tore a rag from the clothes of my first opponent so that I could clean Geese and sheathe her, then headed over to where everyone seemed to be clustering around Ace, Joker, and Duke's lot. Queen trailed after me, still breathing harshly—she wasn't bouncing back from things like this as quickly as she once had. Well, neither was I, really. I might have been thirty-six for eighty years, but thirty-six isn't twenty . . . although I admit that it's been a long time since I could clearly remember what being twenty was like. 

"Geddoe, you bastard." Those were the first words out of Duke's mouth when I got close enough for him to talk to me without the whole plaza overhearing. "You've gotten involved in something big again, haven't you?" 

I shrugged. "Who knows?" I certainly didn't—not yet. 

"Figures. Get yourself—and 'King'—out of town before Headquarters gets burnt down or blown up and we're all out of a job. We'll cover for you somehow—Elaine's fiction- writing skills are as good as Ace's any time. And, Geddoe?" 

I raised my eyebrow, waiting. 

"Come back in one piece, you hear me? I can't prove I'm better than you if you go off and get yourself killed by someone else." 

And that, I decided, wasn't even worth dignifying with a reply. 

" _She's_ their administrator? I'd never have guessed," Joker said as we all turned toward the town gate. 

"How did you think I met her?" Ace replied. 

"Where are we going?" Sasarai asked quietly, after a moment of silence. I think the rest of us had half-forgotten he was even there. 

"For now . . . there's a cave up in the hills, not too far from here, where we usually regroup after having to leave Caleria in a hurry," Joker said. "We'll stay there until morning—we can't go very far until Jacques can travel under his own power, anyway. After that . . . well, that's up to the captain." 

Assuming that I could make up my mind. We still had the option of taking Sasarai to Zexay, or even just dumping him by the side of the road for that matter, but I had a feeling that that getting rid of him wouldn't be the end of our problems. The Howling Voice had already shown they were willing to burn a town down to get at our wayward bishop. They were bound to come after us even if we got rid of him, unless we tied him up and presented him to them on a silver platter with a bow in his hair . . . and I couldn't think of any set of circumstances that would be enough to make me do that. 

And then there was the bigger picture: politics. For most of my lifetime, the conquering juggernaut that was Harmonia had been slowing down—going from gobbling up a country every three or four years, to every seven or eight years . . . and since the conquest of Queen's home, Sanady, they'd ground nearly to a halt—Luc's little adventure in the Grasslands and their contribution to the invasion of Highland notwithstanding. But if whatever faction had sent the Howling Voice Guild after Sasarai gained control of the country, I had a nasty feeling that the juggernaut was going to start up again. And if the Grasslands weren't going to be the first target, they'd still end up as the second or third. 

I'd spilled a lot of blood to protect that land. I had some good friends there—and some others who were buried there—and I wasn't going to let Harmonia have one square inch of it. If this turned out to be a real threat and not just me jumping at shadows, I was going to need Sasarai, because right now, he was the only string I had to pull. 

So we were going to keep Sasarai for the time being. The question was where to take him. From outside Caleria, we had several choices, but I was having a hard time figuring out which was worst. Deeper into Harmonia was out of the question—the Howling Voice would be stronger the nearer we got to Crystal Valley. West into the Grasslands was a possibility, but we'd have to cross the pass to get there, and I couldn't think of a better place for the Howling Voice to ambush us—it's like an open-topped tunnel for a lot of its length. South into Dunan . . . wasn't a good idea for us right now—we'd come from that way, and left a hornet's nest behind us that I didn't want to go walking back into. That left east or north, along the fringes of Holy Harmonia. To the east, we'd eventually reach the coast, where our options would widen out again. To the north, we might be able to slip through the lesser-known pass near the old Safir Village, which didn't have the problems of the high pass near Caleria, and reach our allies in the Grasslands . . . 

"Sasarai." By the time I spoke to him, we had left the road and were scrambling through thorny scrubland. 

"Captain?" Not the form of address I'd expected to hear from him, but I didn't exactly care. 

"You were talking about being framed for some murders—where did they take place?" 

"Iddaran Province. I ended up having to look it up— I'd barely even heard of the place before." 

_Iddaran._ My mouth stretched into a mirthless smile. Well, of course. Given the kind of night I was having, how could it have been anywhere else? 

"Then we head north in the morning." As I said it, we emerged onto level ground just outside the cave. 

"So we're investigating murders now?" Ace must have been paying more attention to what he was saying than where he was walking, because he staggered and nearly fell into the grasp of an amorous thorn bush. 

"You got a better suggestion?" Joker asked. 

"It's just that it's a little outside our area of expertise, you know?" Ace had stopped walking in order to wave his hands expressively. 

"Can you think of any other strings we can pull right now?" Queen asked. "All we've got right now is what Sasarai can tell us—pardon me, Bishop, but—" 

"If I knew what was going on, I would never have ended up in this ridiculous situation," said our refugee. "Captain Geddoe's suggestion strikes me as probably being the best that any of us is going to come up with." 

It hadn't really been a suggestion . . . but I really couldn't force the man to follow my orders, either. 

Joker grabbed Ace by the shoulder and pulled him toward the cave. "Let's get some rest. We've got a long way to go from here." 

I sat down on the ground near the cave, with my back to a boulder, while the others filed inside—someone had to keep watch, and I wanted to be alone with my thoughts for a little while . . . alone with Geese, anyway. I drew her and set her across my knees, ready to hand. 

Iddaran. A forested stretch of north country set athwart the upper portion of the Great River, between the shoulders of the mountains. A place I'd never intended to return to. A place that had left huge bleeding holes in my soul that had never quite healed. 

Would Geese recognize her homeland when we got there? She'd been away for a long time and gotten pretty battered about. I'd done my best to take care of her, gotten the best smiths I could find to repair damaged edges—in fact, now that I thought about it, I'd probably spent more money, over the years, looking after my sword than I had on anything else . . . but then, Geese was more than a weapon. Like the True Rune I bore, she was a sacred charge, a legacy. 

Maybe, I reflected as the rising sun struck fire from her edge, it was time that the two of us went back after all. 


	2. Chapter 2

"Marid is the next town of any size," Queen said as we made camp the next night. "I guess that gives us about a week." 

"A week to what?" Aila asked. 

"To make our friend King here look a little less like something the cat dragged in," Queen said. 

"I'm still not used to that name," Sasarai said. He was crouched with his back to the rest of us, feeding twigs into the little fire that Jacques had started—no inns out here. Hell, there was barely even a pathway for us to follow—most people went from Caleria to Crystal Valley, then back out again, or followed the line of the foothills on the Grasslands side. 

"He does look pretty scruffy, doesn't he?" Joker said. "And underequipped. Who ever heard of an unarmed mercenary?" 

"So much for the budget," Ace muttered. 

Queen gave him a Look. "Did you say something?" 

"Just wondering where we're going to find him a sword when we're out in the middle of the wilderness," Ace replied, but he still looked like he'd just found half a worm in his apple. I couldn't entirely blame him—good swords are expensive, and buying one was going to gut our finances—but I couldn't see a way around it. 

"Not a sword," Sasarai said quietly. "I wouldn't know what to do with one, anyway. When I still . . . I used to be a staff fighter, but I haven't done even that in a long time. Having a True Rune made hand-to-hand fighting seem . . . redundant." 

"That does make things easier," Joker said, already examining the brush growing out of the edges of the rocky little ravine we'd chosen to camp in. "This one'll do, I think," he said, tugging on one particular sapling. "Where's the hatchet?" 

Aila stopped rummaging in her pack to hand it to him, and he began hacking away at the base of the little tree. 

"We need to do something about those clothes, too," Queen added. "Jacques? You're the only one of us who can sew worth a damn." 

"Not tonight," the blond said. "My head still feels like someone's been dropping rocks on it. Taking them in shouldn't take too long, though." 

In the meanwhile, Joker had gotten the sapling down, and was trimming the branches off. "King, come over here for a second—I think this is a little tall for you, but I'm not sure." 

Sasarai looked a bit bemused as he went over to stand beside the older man. Joker stood the proto-staff on end and measured them against one another. 

"I'll be damned—guess it's about right after all. Here." 

The ex-bishop took the length of wood, still bark- covered, arranged his hands on it, and began a sequence of movements, slow and fumbling at first, then with a little more assurance. _Guard, swing, swing, high guard, left, low guard, right, quick thrust . . ._ Yeah, he'd used a staff before, all right, although I didn't recognize his style—it didn't match the one they normally taught Harmonian army mages. 

Aila had finally found what she wanted from her pack—a length of brightly-embroidered Karaya-made cloth trim. "Here," she said, holding it out to Sasarai. 

The ex-bishop grounded his new staff at his side and accepted it, but his eyebrows had gone straight up. 

"If you're going to wear a headband, you need something that looks a little less like a rejected piece of someone's horse harness," Aila explained. 

"Oh." The eyebrows came down, and Sasarai snaked his arm around his staff so that he could use both hands without having it fall over, turning half-away from us as he did so. He stripped off the leather headband and tossed it into the brush, then tied the new cloth one into place. Then he turned back toward the rest of us. 

Ace snickered. "You look like a Karaya Clan reject!" 

Aila stamped on his foot, which wiped the smirk off his face pretty quickly. 

"I'm going hunting," the Karaya girl said in a disgusted tone. "Jacques . . . ?" 

The blond winced. "Like I said, not tonight." 

Queen, meanwhile, was contemplating Sasarai again. "You still look too much like you belong in the Harmonian army- -I think it's the haircut. Now, where did I put those scissors?" 

Anyway, between all that and an eight-day growth of beard, we felt safe enough taking Sasarai into Marid with us when we got there—which was a good thing, as Queen pointed out, since we needed him to be present when we bought the last few items needed to complete his disguise. Armour has to be fitted if it's going to do much good, and it's more difficult to retailor than clothes. Ace came up with a story involving a dunking in a river and a lost pack—looking offended whenever he came up with some improbable elaboration and Joker, Queen, and Aila conspired to quash it—and we all went over it until the details were firmly planted in our minds. Then we circled around and entered the town from the north. 

And the first thing we saw was a large and not-too- flattering picture of Sasarai tacked up on someone's wall, with "Reward—3000000 potch" written underneath it. 

Ace whistled softly. "That's a lot of money. Shame I haven't seen the guy." He wandered in closer and scanned the fine print. "Dead or alive. Murder, treason, jailbreak. May be travelling alone or with his chief of staff, Dios, who's wanted for questioning—little picture of him, too, and a ten thousand potch reward, alive only." 

_No mention of us, though,_ I noted. Then again, this poster had probably been printed before Sasarai had left Crystal Valley, if it had gotten as far as Marid so soon, and there might be an amended one circulating in the more central regions of the country in a couple of weeks, as soon as they'd found someone to carve the template. 

_So someone expected him to escape._

Queen sighed. "And here I was hoping for a bath tonight." 

"Whoa, there," Ace said. "Do we really need to change our plans? It's going to be a while before we hit anywhere else that's large enough to have an inn." 

I was looking at Sasarai, and decided he still looked a little too much like that poster for my comfort. "Queen's right. In another couple of weeks, it'll probably be safe enough, but right now his beard is too obviously new." Especially given the way he was scratching it—apparently without realizing he was doing so, because when I mentioned that beard, he lowered his hand. Instead, he turned back toward the edge of town, and had taken a couple of steps before he noticed that no one was following him and turned back toward the rest of us. 

"Aren't we leaving?" 

"That would be too suspicious," Joker explained. "And we still need to buy you some armour. No, we'll go shopping, have lunch, _then_ leave." 

Fortunately, the local defensive gear salesman had a second-hand set of leather armour that was close enough to being "King"'s size, and he threw in a pair of gloves and some calf-high hard-leather boots at no extra charge, claiming that he'd had them lying around gathering dust for quite a while and wanted to get them off his hands. Ace still had to haggle a little bit, for show, but even then we were on our way out of town again within two hours. 

For the next twelve days, we made no stopovers at all, mostly because there was nowhere to stop _at_ —five years ago, we might have visited the Safir Clan's village, although it was a little out of our way, but there was no one living in that particular valley anymore, thanks to Harmonia and Luc. Safir was as far north as any of the others had ever been on this side of the mountains, which meant that after we passed it, I was the one blazing trail . . . and occasionally leading us on unexpected detours, because even I hadn't been this way in decades. Fortunately, though, mountains are pretty unmistakable landmarks, so we reached Haddarat only a couple of days behind schedule. 

I remembered it as a sleepy farming village—well, really, a hamlet with delusions of grandeur, a half-dozen houses with a blacksmith and a little tavern that claimed it was an inn because it had a lean-to bolted onto its side that it occasionally let out to travellers. The Harmonians had apparently thought its strategic position, right at the southern end of the Throat—the narrow band of flat, arable land that provided the easiest route into Iddaran from the south—too good to ignore, though, because they'd built a fortress there. 

It wasn't exactly another Brass Castle, just a medium- sized fort capable of housing a couple of hundred army regulars, but to me, its shadow seemed to spread across the entire area, tainting it with . . . with _Harmonianess_. 

_Get a grip,_ I told myself. _It_ is _Harmonian now._ I would probably have had to go door-to- door through the entire town—which was large enough now that I wouldn't have been embarrassed calling it that—to scrape together three other people who remembered Iddaran as a free nation, and all of them would probably have been children at the time, and ancient now. There were probably soldiers up at that fort whose ancestors I'd fought beside in that last futile attempt to save this country from Harmonia. 

"Captain?" 

I realized suddenly that I'd been standing there for several minutes, staring blankly at the distant settlement, and shook myself a bit. "Let's go." Then I noticed that Aila was crouching with her hand flat on the ground. 

She looked up at the rest of us and shook her head. "The spirits here won't talk to me," she said in an odd tone of voice. "That's never happened before, even down in Dunan. It's as though someone's gagged them." 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sasarai go very still. I just shook my head, thinking that it made sense for the spirits here to be cringing like whipped dogs. Harmonia never had been very respectful of the land she conquered. 

The town had no wall—probably Harmonia hadn't wanted to make the settlement itself defensible if it wasn't absolutely necessary, since that would let it become a strongpoint for any rebellion that might take place. Instead, they'd put the money that might have paid for that into paving the streets, an expensive touch I wouldn't have expected in such a small town. 

"Funny," Ace said as we entered the plaza that appeared to serve as the town's main commercial district. "No Wanted posters." 

"If there are any, they're probably up at the castle," Sasarai replied. "We usually don't post them in areas where most of the population consists of Third Class Citizens." 

"Yeah, can't have them capturing dangerous criminals," Aila said in an acidic tone of voice. "If they realized it was possible, they might take it into their heads to do something about the dangerous criminals that work for Harmonia." 

The rest of us kind of rolled our eyes. Aila was a good archer and a decent earth-mage and neophyte shaman, and could hold her own in a fight, but she was still very young and very Karaya, and tended to forget who she was working for these days every so often. Normally, someone would have pointed that out to her, she'd have been the victim of a round of good-natured teasing, and we'd have moved on, but today we were interrupted. 

"How dare you say that?" 

He was young, maybe sixteen. Just another townsman, dark-haired and -eyed, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and the kind of arm muscles that meant he definitely wasn't working as a clerk. _Probably wins a lot of brawls hereabouts because he's strong, but hasn't ever challenged a trained fighter._

Queen put one hand on her hip and cocked her head. "You trying to tell us that there isn't a single rotten apple in the garrison here? Not even one guy who steals from people by threatening them with false obstruction charges? No one who takes bribes? Get real." 

The kid must have taken a good look at the rest of us about then, and seen the armour and weapons and the runes on everyone's hands and foreheads, because he mumbled an apology and backed off, but the encounter left a sour taste in everyone's mouths. 

The town wasn't exactly overendowed with inns—not many people passing through now that most of the trade went through Crystal Valley instead of coming up directly from the south, I guess—and the first one we found, I wouldn't have told my worst enemy to stay at. The other one—the _only_ other one—had clearly been built to house travelling officials and rich merchants, and I had to directly order Ace to make him shell out for rooms there, even though we'd looted enough corpses in the back of beyond to have the money. He was still muttering something about "a thousand potch per person per night" when we went downstairs for a drink. 

The place was too posh to have anything like a common room. What they did have was an honest-to-goodness restaurant, complete with padded chairs and dim lighting. The waitress who met us at the door turned up her nose at the lot of us and escorted us to a table in the back corner near the door to the kitchen, probably hoping that any other patrons who showed up at this hour of the day wouldn't notice us. I think they might even have had a house policy about not allowing weapons into the place, but if there was, after a second look at us she must have decided not to enforce it. 

"My, my," Queen murmured as she examined a wine list. "Not quite up to the standards of, say, Muse, but quite nice all the same." 

"Eighteen different kinds of beer," Joker said in a satisfied tone of voice. "Why don't we live like this all the time?" 

Ace snorted. "How long do you think a place like this would last in Caleria?" 

"You've got a point," Joker admitted. "Y'know, I think I'll just start at the top of this list and work my way down to the bottom." 

"Slowly," I said. It wasn't a suggestion. 

Joker sighed. "I know, I know—can't risk being too drunk if our friends turn up again, and besides, they'd probably throw me out of here if I started to sing." 

"I know I would," Queen said. 

I propped my elbow on the table and rested my chin on my hand. I'd taken the seat farthest back in the corner, beside Sasarai, with Queen on my blind side, and that had unexpectedly given me a pretty good view through the barely-open shutters of the window behind our table. Actually, it was just about the same view as you'd been able to see by looking through the cracks in the wall of the old Haddarat pseudo-inn's lean-to, nearly a hundred years ago—scrub forest, then the hills . . . If it hadn't been for the tangle of bushes and small trees, you would have been able to see _that place_ from here, the one where a handful of exhausted survivors had struggled to dig a trench in ground that was still half frozen, to lay a body in—a naked body, whose face had been systematically mutilated after death at the owner's request, to prevent it being identified if anyone chose to shift frozen earth and mounded stone to check on it. 

I was probably the only one who remembered that now, who had any idea what had happened to him, or where he lay. _Damn._ He hadn't been the best or the brightest of men, but he'd deserved better than to be forgotten that way. 

"Captain? You okay?" 

I turned my attention back to the room I was in. _Should have noticed the waitress come over—damn, I'm getting old and distracted. Should have noticed that the conversation had stopped, for that matter._ And no matter what I thought or felt, I couldn't afford to be that distracted right now—with the Howling Voice on our tail, it might end up being fatal. 

There are two ways to deal with something distracting—try to ignore the problem, and risk it creeping up on you again, or attack it head on and hope that you can deal with it. And I had a feeling that ignoring things wasn't going to be the answer this time, because for the next few weeks I was probably going to be getting the relevant chapters of my past shoved in my face practically every time I turned around. 

I pushed my chair back from the table and picked up Geese, whom I'd taken off my belt because you can't really sit in a chair with arms while you're wearing a sword. 

"I've got a private errand to run," I said. "Be back in an hour or two." 

That got a lot of surprised blinks, a "Whatever," from Ace, and a "Don't do anything I wouldn't," from Queen as she moved her chair to make it easier for me to get out. 

The man behind the desk in the main lobby was only too glad to tell me where to find a wine merchant—probably because if I were out and wandering the streets, I'd no longer be lowering the tone inside his business. It wasn't all that difficult to find the place, either, which was a good thing, because I don't think I would have had the heart to ask any of the people I passed in the streets. Most of 'em were pretty scared of me, I think, judging from how they flinched away when I got too close for their taste. _Probably aren't used to armed men who aren't in uniform._

The merchant was quite happy to sell me a bottle of expensive brandy that had to have been sitting on his back shelf for quite some time, judging by the layer of dust coating it. I tucked it under my arm and set out for the edge of town. 

It had, I discovered, mostly decided to expand in the other direction, away from the dry creekbed that I remembered, leaving open fields between there and the nearest houses, and I relaxed just a little, dismissing the thought that the spot I was looking for had been built over at some point during the intervening eighty years. 

There were a few paths that led through the tall grass, to or along the edge of the ravine, but even now, nobody seemed to have bothered to bridge it. I had to scramble down one bank and up the other, without dropping the bottle I was carrying— must have been quite the spectacle, if anyone was watching. On the other side, I wasted a minute or two struggling with low, whippy, interwoven branches, then gave up and drew Geese to hack myself a path. It was all the more annoying because I wasn't entirely sure I was even moving in the right direction. 

And then, when I found it, I almost didn't recognize it. We hadn't been able to build the cairn much more than knee- high—a sad monument to a man that we had all _liked_ , if not exactly respected, and a far cry from the carven marble sepulchres of his ancestors . . . but it had been the best we could manage, working quickly and in secret. 

I cleared the brush out of the way, and then sat down on a fallen log, contemplating it. If we'd buried him where he could be found, the Harmonians would probably have ended up exhuming him, burning the body, and shipping his ashes to the other side of the country to be scattered, so that his grave couldn't form a focal point for new unrest—I'd heard of them doing as much in other recently conquered provinces. Whether being left here to moulder undisturbed—and unremembered—was better was one of those questions I just didn't have an answer to. 

Opening the brandy bottle was another one of those sequences of low comedy you sometimes see at the theatre, since I didn't have the right tools. In the end, I used Geese to score a circle around the neck, and then, with some effort, managed to break it apart with my hands. 

I rose to my feet slowly, with the open bottle in one hand and my sword in the other. The protocol that I'd allowed myself to mostly forget decades ago called for me to raise my sword in salute at that point—or something like that—but I stuck her point-down in the ground instead. This was a private matter between me and the man lying under the cairn, not one of the formal ceremonies I'd hated so much. 

I extended my left arm and tilted the bottle, slowly. Brandy splashed against the stones. 

"There's nothing he'd miss, where he is now, nearly as much as a good drink," I said quietly to the familiar footsteps coming up behind me. "Why did you follow me, Wang?" 

"We decided it was too dangerous to have any of us wandering around alone, even you," Joker said. "Was this someone you knew?" 

"Yeah, a long time ago." The bottle was empty now. I bent down and set it gently upright at the base of the pile of stones. 

"He must've been important to you—you don't normally visit graves." 

I shrugged. "I owe him. There's something I promised him a long time ago that I wasn't able to bring myself to do. I just ran away, like a coward." 

Joker sat down on the log I'd just left. After a moment, I sat beside him, and started cleaning sap off Geese's edge. 

"It's hard to imagine you running away from anything," he said. 

"I was a lot younger then," I said quietly. "And a chunk of my world had just come apart, and I'd just gotten hit with a responsibility that I'd never expected to have." My right hand clenched briefly into a fist. I forced myself to relax it, to go back to cleaning my sword. "It's all water under the bridge now, anyway." 

"So this . . . whatever he wanted . . . isn't possible anymore." 

I snorted. "You were there with us today when that kid tried to take Aila's head off. Can you imagine him, or anyone like him, taking up arms against Harmonia? I'm not sure that even something on the order of what Luc did to Le Buque would be able to make them that angry now. Iddaran will never be a separate country again, unless Harmonia falls apart." 

"Is _that_ what your friend wanted?" 

My eye strayed to the cairn. "He was the last of their line of Princes. It was in his blood. And I wouldn't exactly call him a friend. We . . . weren't that close." 

Joker whistled softly. "Still, you really do know the damndest people, Captain." 

I shrugged, and wiped Geese against my leg to get rid of that last elusive trace of sap before I sheathed her. 

I couldn't tell you what sent me rolling forward off the log, Geese still bare in my hand, and I doubt Joker could, either. The snap of a branch, maybe. Or the click of someone preparing a gun to be fired. All I know is that suddenly I was kneeling instead of seated as something whined by above my head, hitting the empty bottle and turning it into shards of glass. And it took me another moment after that to register _bullet_ and _gun_ and _Howling Voice, again._

If the favoured weapon of the Howling Voice Guild has one saving grace as far as the rest of us are concerned, though, it's that reloading it is a fiddly process and takes longer than firing off a low-level spell from a school of magic that you're even reasonably good at . . . and I'm pretty good at lightning spells. I didn't even have to cast one completely—just starting to invoke my Thunder Rune nearly got me hit in the head by a flung powder horn. _Either this one's been up against a lightning caster before, or he heard what happened in Caleria._

Probably the latter, I decided—our opponent was a kid, no older than the one who'd been offended by Aila when we'd first gotten to town. Red-haired and freckled, he wouldn't have looked much like a killer if it hadn't been for the expression, or rather the non-expression, on his face. Cold, ice-cold. Not that we would have hesitated anyway—Joker and I had both been in this business long enough to know that being killed by someone who didn't need to shave yet didn't magically make you any less dead. 

When he saw we were both still on our feet, he dropped his gun and pulled a knife. I moved forward and engaged him with Geese as Joker started to circle around behind him . . . and I soon had my hands full, because he used the same trick of going after my blind side as the last one had. I couldn't just stay on the defensive, either—I had to try to keep the kid from seeing where Joker was or where he was doing, and that meant keeping him busy. 

And then I . . . well, it wasn't _exactly_ a screw-up. My foot slipped, just a little—it happens to even the best of us. Normally, I would have recovered almost immediately and it wouldn't have mattered, but Joker picked that moment to hit the kid in the back, and because I was off-balance, Geese was out of position, and the blow slammed the kid forward onto her. All I could do was twist to avoid his knife as the unexpected impact made me lose my balance completely and landed me on one knee. 

The kid pulled himself off my sword again, but it was pretty obvious that the blade had gone into his lung, and he wavered on his feet, coughing and spitting blood. On my feet again, I grabbed for his shoulder with my free hand, but all that got me was a knife-score across the knuckles of my glove. 

Joker grabbed the kid from behind in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his sides. "Look, if you want to live, you'll answer our questions." 

Instead, the kid tried to spit blood in my face. I made a quick side-step so that it wouldn't hit me, but that meant that when he brought his knife stabbing downward, I couldn't quite get Geese in at the right angle to block him before his blade tore open the artery in his groin. Between that and the other, he was unconscious in seconds, and dead in only a few more. 

"Damn," Joker muttered. 

I nodded silently. Not only had we failed to get any information, but the kid's timing bothered me. If we'd been attacked in town, while Sasarai had been with us, that would have been one thing, but out here, alone . . . that meant we had been marked out, that the Howling Voice knew who "King" was and that we were protecting him. And I doubted very much that they thought we were innocent dupes. 

"Let's get back to town," I said. If the Howling Voice had sent only one person to Haddarat, then we were out of danger for a day or two, but if there had been more than one . . .


	3. Chapter 3

I knew the moment that I saw a knot of people gathered outside the bar where we'd left the others that the worst had happened. _Well, the second-worst,_ I corrected myself, seeing flashes of bright Karaya clothing peeping out from between other people's shoulders and torsos, and hearing Ace's voice, pitched to carry. 

"For the third time: we're members of Southern Frontier Defense Force Unit Twelve. We're following up a lead on a smuggling investigation—" 

"Don't give me that. The SFDF doesn't do smuggling investigations—" 

_Quick-thinking local cop,_ I guessed, _or someone down from the fort._ That was all we needed. 

"We do when it's weapons smuggling," I called, and was pleased and amused to note that the civilian spectators glanced at me quickly and then got the hell out of the way. Queen, Ace, Jacques, Aila, and "King"—everyone present and accounted for, I saw with relief. And, facing them, several people in Regular Army blue, with varying amounts of fancy trim on their clothes. "You mind telling me what's going on here?" I added, as Joker and I reached the rest of the troop. I positioned myself beside Ace, facing the army type with the most gold braid—looked like a junior captain, maybe . . . blue-eyed, and with hair that was _that shade_ of blonde. _A First Class Citizen—wonderful. Could this get any worse?_ The others were clumped up behind, with Sasarai in the center. 

"What's going on, Captain . . . ?" The army type frowned when I refused to supply my name, then went on, "is that we have a dead body, and your . . . people . . ." He gave Queen a nasty look. " . . . won't explain _why_ it's a dead body." 

"I _told_ you that the bastard attacked us," Ace said. 

Apparently, I'd been too optimistic when I'd assessed this maybe-captain as "quick-thinking"—he seemed more the stubborn, rule-bound type. "And you won't tell us _why_." 

"How should _we_ know?" I'd rarely seen Ace so exasperated before. He was waving his hands in wider and wider motions. "Maybe his boss is at the other end of the money trail we were trying to follow before you made us explain why we were here to half the population of Haddarat. Maybe he just didn't like Grasslanders, or something about my face got on his nerves. Anyway, we'll be leaving town tomorrow, so you won't have to worry about any more dead bodies after that." 

"Y'know," Queen added, "we're all supposed to be on the same side." 

"Captain," added one of the other Regulars, "you know the commandant won't be happy if he has to get involved in something like this. I mean, if these people really are SFDF, he's going to have to contact Caleria, and—" 

The captain said something I doubted very much that he'd learned as a child in an upper-class household, then added, "All right, you people have until nightfall tomorrow to get out of town. If you're still here then, I'm going to run you in until we can send to Caleria to confirm your identities." 

"We'll be gone by noon," Ace snapped. Everyone had a hand on his or her weapon. _Time to defuse the situation, if I can._

"Let's go," I said, and jerked my head back towards the inn. 

"Right." 

We made a bit of a production out of it, I guess—Ace on my left, Queen on my right, Aila, Jacques, and Joker in a wedge behind me with Sasarai at the center, all marching up to the door of the inn in formation—but I couldn't have cared less. Inside, we all filed upstairs while the innkeeper hid his face in his hands. 

"Looks like he thinks we've ruined his reputation," Ace said. 

"We probably have," Queen said dryly. "Or do you think anyone else is going to want to stay here tonight?" 

"You've got a point." 

The room Joker, Jacques, and Sasarai were sharing was once again the largest one we had, so we all trooped in there together and shut the door, after a quick check of the hallway. Ace and Queen each picked a window and stuck their heads out, glancing down, across, and up to make sure that no one was clinging to the side of the building to listen in. After a moment, both pulled back in and nodded the all-clear. 

"Damn," Joker said, flopping down on his back on one of the beds. 

Ace grunted. "Better hope he doesn't send to Caleria anyway. I never did get to file that report, so there's no paper trail on 'King' here unless Elaine's come up with something. And even if she has, we have no way of telling what kind of details she put in—easy to screw up if they question us." 

"Um . . ." Jacques cleared his throat. "Sorry, but am I missing something? You didn't have any kind of papers for me except my enlistment form when we first got to Caleria, either, and there weren't any problems—the Defense Force even paid me." 

"You weren't pretending to be someone else," Joker explained. 

"Exactly," Ace said. "We need to avoid having anyone connect 'King' with Bishop Sasarai, right? If there were some kind of record of him that went back to before Sasarai got put under house arrest, that would be easy." 

"Oh." 

"It's a shame I didn't know in advance that I was going to have to do something like this," Sasarai said quietly. "We could have had records going all the way back to my childhood." 

"No use crying over spilled beer," Ace said easily. "We're just going to have to make do with what we've got." 

"Was the guy who came after you Howling Voice, too?" Joker asked. 

Ace pulled a gun out of his pocket and laid it on the bed. "Managed to get this off the body before anyone else got a good look." Then he frowned. "Hey, whaddaya mean, 'too'?" 

I let Joker tell our little story. 

When he was done, Queen shook her head. "Kids as assassins. These people have a lot to answer for." 

"I don't think you can really call any Howling Voice operative a child," Sasarai said. "By the time the Guild permits them to leave the Tower on a mission, they are already highly trained professionals, regardless of age." 

I stared at the gun on the bed, wondering why something about the way he said that made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was just the implicit assumption that the situation couldn't be changed. 

"Something special about this thing?" Ace asked. 

I shook my head. He picked the gun up and slid it back into his pocket, where it made an odd-looking bulge. 

"Hope there's a river between here and this Forestwall place where I can ditch it," he said. "I hate having to hold onto it even that long—someone might get the wrong idea." 

"Right," Queen drawled, then turned to me. "Are we still going to find a blacksmith to have King's staff shod while we're in town, or are we going to let that wait until the next time we have a chance?" 

Unless some farming settlement large enough to have its own smith had come into existence in the period since I'd last been this way, the next chance would be Forestwall, at the other end of the Throat—the better part of a week away. "No, we'll get it done first thing in the morning, then leave town." To my eye, Sasarai's plain wooden staff looked out of place among our heavier weapons. Getting metal caps and bands put on it would at least make it obvious that it _was_ a weapon, and not just a walking stick. Granted, having him look more authentic wouldn't help with the Howling Voice at this point, but it might with the wanted posters. "In the meanwhile, I want everyone to stay put." 

"You mean, you want _me_ to stay put," Sasarai said. He sounded irritated. 

"That's part of it," I admitted, "but I don't think we should risk having anyone get in trouble with the guards here again. Or our . . . other friends." 

Joker sighed. "Guess we're going to be setting watches tonight." 

"Doubles," I confirmed. "Jacques and Aila first, then you and Queen, then me and Ace. Watchers patrol the hallway, and everyone's doors stay open. And Jacques—no sneaking off to sleep in a tree outside town." 

"Whatever you say, Captain." I could never tell whether the blond looked disappointed or not—his poker face is that good. 

"You know, I'd like to feel like I'm pulling at least a little of my own weight," Sasarai complained mildly. 

Ace snorted. "You're complaining because we're letting you take it easy?" 

I held up one hand. "You don't know our signals, or our way of doing things, so I can't count you as part of the watch roster, but you can join Queen and Joker's watch tonight if you want to start learning." _And I don't know you well enough to trust you, so if you're going to insist on doing this, I'm going to give you the worst watch of the night in company with two of my more experienced people, so that they can keep an eye on you._

"All right." 

"Anyone else got anything to add?" I asked, not expecting that they would. "If not, I'm going to turn in for a while." If you've got the late watch, it's sensible to nap if you can. 

Alone in my room—well, "alone" was a relative term, since I left my door open as I'd advised everyone else to do tonight—I allowed myself the luxury of stripping off, not just my boots and swordbelt, but my outer shell of armour, before lying down, and a few minutes later, I was dead to the world. 

Despite—or maybe because of—the elaborate precautions I'd had everyone take, no one tried to knife us in our beds that night. Joker rolled me out of bed a couple of hours before dawn and I spent the rest of the night pacing up and down the hallway with Ace, exchanging no words even when we passed each other in the middle of our beat. 

Breakfast was likewise a pretty quiet meal, partly because it was also a very _good_ meal—to my surprise, the hotel restaurant had still been willing to serve us despite the others having killed a man on the premises the previous day. So when Aila inserted a "So, where are we going from here?" into a conversation that had consisted mostly, up to that point, of things like "pass the salt", we were all just a bit startled. 

"Oerat," I said briefly, taking another mouthful of toast. 

"Where?" 

I took my time chewing and swallowing. "It used to be the capital—still is, I guess. It's the biggest city in the province, anyway." 

"Then you have a lead," Sasarai said, staring at me intently. 

I shrugged. 

Aila snorted. "Don't waste your time, King. He's always like this. Even now that we _know_ how he knows all kinds of weird people like Salome and the old Lizard Tribe chieftain, he won't tell us the _why_ of anything unless he thinks we need to know or we spend several days working on him. I'll bet he knows someone in this Oerat place he thinks can give him some kind of lead, if he doesn't have one already." 

I shook my head. "Not anymore—not unless someone's moved there recently, anyway. I told you I haven't been up this way in a while." _A long while._ And not many of the people I had known then had survived the Harmonian invasion, anyway. 

"Anyway, we have an errand at the blacksmith's first," Ace muttered through a mouthful of something, just in case anyone had forgotten. 

There was only one smithy in town, although the fortress probably had another of its own. In fact, it was the same smithy that had stood at the heart of the hamlet of Haddarat the last time I'd passed through the area. The invading Harmonians had defaced the old Royal Guild insignia carved into the stone beside the doorway, but otherwise they seemed to have left the building intact. 

"I don't do much weapons-work," the smith admitted as he studied Sasarai's staff. "No one around here's allowed to own one unless they're in the militia—but you know that." 

I let Ace do the nodding. My attention was elsewhere, on the figure bent over the anvil, frowning intently at a half-formed nail. _I'll be damned—isn't that the kid that nearly ripped Aila a new one yesterday? Guess he's an apprentice here._

There was another, younger, apprentice too, sweating over the bellows, and an old man sitting in one corner, with a cane leaning against his chair. All four bore a certain resemblance to one another, and I suspected they were related— the old guy would be a past master and father of the present one, and the 'prentices would be the smith's sons or nephews. 

Then the kid who was bending over the anvil gave his nail a couple more whacks, straightened up, saw us . . . and went absolutely white. You could just about see the thoughts running through his head—something along the lines of, _Oh, hell, they're not going to be able to find enough of me to have a funeral!_

I snorted and turned my head away . . . to discover that the old man was watching me. I returned his stare, hoping that if I'd known him as a kid, back in the old days, he at least didn't recognize me. 

He got up and came over to us while Ace and the smith were haggling over price, and how much now and how much after the work was done. Queen took a step to the right, protectively placing herself in the hole my lost eye left in my peripheral vision, just in case, but the geezer didn't make any hostile moves. _Not Howling Voice in disguise, then._ What he did do took me by surprise, though. 

"Pardon me, Captain, but would you let me have a look at your sword?" The hand he held out was sinewy and age- spotted, but it didn't tremble, and there was still visible muscle on the arm that supported it. 

My eyebrow went up. Then I shrugged. _I suppose it's a harmless enough request—it isn't as though I can ever be genuinely unarmed with a True Rune riding me._ So I drew Geese slowly, and handed her over to him. 

He leaned his cane, and his elbow, against the wall so that he could take her gently in both hands. "Beautiful," he breathed, startling a laugh out of Ace. And it's true that, at first glance, Geese looks like a very ordinary sword—even her hilt is plain iron and undyed leather . . . but the old man clearly knew blades, not something I would have expected of a retired country blacksmith. He might even be able to figure out that Geese's current hilt wasn't the original. "Cayle, Landon, come have a look—I haven't seen a blade of this quality since I was a 'prentice myself, and certainly not one made in the old style. I don't suppose . . . do you know her name, sir?" 

The smith, who was securing Sasarai's staff in a vise, paused to say, "Grandpa, not everyone names their swords!" in a way that made it sound like the last line of an old argument. 

"Her name's Wild Geese," I said, watching as three heads, two dark and one white, bent over my sword. At the sound of my voice, the white one snapped up. 

"'Wild—'" A long hesitation. "Forgive me, Captain. I'm certain it's merely an interesting coincidence, but my first master made a blade of that name once." 

"Pretty amazing if it did turn out to be the same sword," Joker said idly, and I shot him a sharp look. _Shut up, Wang._ I was cursing myself now for having handed the sword over. 

"As my master's Wild Geese has been missing for eighty years, I would say, more than amazing," the old man said tartly. "I doubt not that she's rusting under a field somewhere near Oerat, or was melted down to make torch sconces. But this one is still a fine sword—she's been beautifully cared for. I thank you for the opportunity to examine her, Captain." 

I accepted Geese back and sheathed her carefully, ignoring the sidelong glances of the two apprentices. The old man didn't approach me again during the half-hour or so we stayed at the forge, and the two boys didn't have time after the smith put them to work feeding the fire and working the bellows, but I could feel their eyes on me every so often. I was glad when the staff was done and we could finally leave. 

I'd assumed, or at least hoped, that that would be the end of the matter—it really was an interesting coincidence if the old man had been a 'prentice at the Oerat smithy where Geese had been forged, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately, not everyone seemed to share that opinion. 

We were just a little past the last line of houses on the outskirts of town when I heard rustling noises coming from behind us. Without turning around, I made a small signal with my hand, and Jacques slowed and faded back to check on things. 

A few moments later, we heard the sounds of a struggle, and we all turned and drew . . . just in time to see Jacques come walking out of the brush, pushing the older smith's apprentice in front of him. 

The kid must have gotten his toe caught on something, because as Jacques pushed him out onto the path we'd been following, he stumbled and landed on his knees. 

"What's _he_ doing here?" Joker asked. 

The kid looked up at us—no, at me—with smouldering eyes. "I'm sorry, your Highness, but I had to follow you." 

Maybe he hadn't tripped after all. 

Everyone was staring at me. 

_Damn._


	4. Chapter 4

"Something we should know about, boss?" Ace asked. 

I sighed. "Just a case of mistaken identity. Get up, kid." 

The kid stayed stubbornly on his knees. In the end, I had to grab him—one hand on his collar, the other in his hair—and lift him before he'd get his feet under him. Jacques grabbed him by the shoulders to hold him there without waiting for orders. 

"Now, you mind explaining to everyone who you think I am, and why, so we can get this over with as quickly as possible?" I folded my arms and waited expectantly. 

"You said your sword's name was Wild Geese," the kid said sullenly. "The same as the sword Great-great-grandpa made for Prince Varen, right before the war. And they weren't allowed to give the same name to two swords—there used to be a Named Blades registry at the Guildhall in Oerat, to keep that from happening—so it has to be the same sword. So you have to be the Prince's great-grandson . . . or maybe you're even Varen himself, in disguise. He had the True Lightning Rune, so he wouldn't get any older if he didn't want to." 

"Sounds like somebody jumped to a conclusion," Queen said. 

I sighed. "Look, kid . . . Geese was given to me by a dying man, a long time ago. He wasn't a relative, and his name wasn't Varen . . . and he wasn't in any condition to explain where he got her." It's wonderful how the truth can obscure things sometimes. 

"But you even have a Circle of Six—" 

"A what?" Aila asked. 

The kid scowled. "It's like a bodyguard for the Prince. They all had them." 

That got grins from everyone. 

"Tell you a secret, kid," Ace said. "The captain doesn't need bodyguards—he can outfight all the rest of us put together." 

_Don't exaggerate, you idiot._ "So now that you know, why don't you run on home before someone notices you're gone and reports you?" _For once, the laws forbidding Third Class Citizens from travelling might actually come in handy._

"I have permission to leave town and go to Oerat," the kid corrected, still glaring. "I'm due for my journeyman exams, and Dad can't administer them. The permissions just came through this morning, right after you guys left." 

_And so he finished packing in a hurry and came running after us. His pack probably has three socks in it, none of them matching, and no food at all._

"And I'm going to come with you no matter what you say. That sword came from somewhere. You know _something_ , even if it's just the name of the man who gave it to you." 

I shrugged. "It's a public highway. We can't stop you from following us. Let him go," I added to Jacques, who immediately released the kid. 

Ace and Joker played a couple of rounds of Rock- Paper-Scissors to see who would get to be point scout. Ace won, and scurried off ahead while Joker cursed him for a cheat. Meanwhile, the rest of us arranged ourselves in a loose group with Sasarai in the center and me on the left, where my eye was less of a handicap. The kid—Landon?—fell in at the rear, beside Aila. 

"I don't get it," I heard him say. "Why does it matter so much who's in front?" 

"The lead scout gets the first chance to go through the pockets of any dead bodies we trip over," Aila replied in a matter-of-fact tone. 

The kid gagged. "You steal from _corpses_?" 

"We're mercenaries—we take what we can get," the girl replied primly. "And besides, it's a waste to leave a useful object lying beside the road to decay just because the owner happens to be dead. In the Grasslands, when someone dies, his possessions—well, not his clothes or his weapons, but everything else—are divided between the other members of the tribe. I've never understood why you 'civilized' people are so afraid of your dead. Now, I've got a question for you, too—why does a Harmonian sympathizer like you care about this Prince Varen and his sword? He was from before Harmonia conquered this place, wasn't he?" 

"I . . . I'm sorry about what I said to you yesterday, I guess. It's just that we can get in trouble for bad-mouthing Harmonia, and . . . well, it just didn't seem fair that you could say whatever you wanted. I'm not really a Harmonian-lover. And about the Prince . . . well, it's just such a good story, you know? He disappeared at the end of the war, him and two of his Circle of Six, and no one knows what happened to him . . . unless your captain does. They even say that he's going to come back some day and throw Harmonia out, but I don't think anyone really believes that anymore." 

Joker, I noted, was looking at me speculatively. He'd probably put a name to the resident of the grave I had been visiting yesterday by now—he wasn't stupid. I just hoped he would have the sense not to say anything in front of Sasarai or the kid—I knew the others were already a lost cause, but they could at least be trusted to keep a secret. 

We made pretty good time that morning—the road was better than the ones further south, even paved in some spots, and I was cautiously optimistic about our chances of reaching Forestwall within four days. The road was clearly being patrolled, too, because we saw no monsters at all until late that afternoon, and the area wasn't so heavily settled that they would have tended to avoid it. 

The kid had managed to keep up with us until we stopped for lunch, but after that he started gradually falling behind, walking like his feet hurt and stopping to rest more often than we needed to. Hardly surprising, really—like anything else, travelling long distances on foot is something that gets easier with practice. You learn how to pace yourself, and how to baby your feet so that you don't get blisters even from new boots. Even someone like Sasarai, who'd done some foot travel before he'd met up with us in Caleria, takes a little while to toughen up, and the kid had probably never been more than a couple of hours from home before. 

Anyway, by a couple of hours past lunch, he was trailing Aila by close to a bowshot. It was around that time that we heard howling and . . . well, there's no other way to put it: someone was screaming with terror. 

Aila immediately turned around and sprinted back along our trail to check on our uninvited guest. A beat later, Jacques was following her. 

The rest of us sort of stopped and looked at each other for a second—Ace, who'd swapped marching positions with Joker at the noon break, even rolled his eyes—before going after the two of them. 

It was the first time I'd ever seen such a large pack of Shadow Dogs—most areas can't support more than two or three at a time, and the packs fight among themselves when they don't have anything better to do, but this had been a group of six before Aila and Jacques had turned one into a pincushion and made a fair start on another. _Must be the parents and last year's litter, or something,_ I thought as I slashed one of them across the face, noting that the one Queen was fighting still had a spray of juvenile spots across its back. 

Fortunately for the kid, it had been a long time since a bunch of Shadow Dogs was much of a match for us, and by the time Joker caught up and was able to join in the fun, there were only two left. The other three were, respectively, Pincushion Number Two, slashed to ribbons by Queen and Ace, and cut across the throat by me. Sasarai had—sensibly—not joined in directly. Instead, he'd taken up a position in front of the kid and was using his staff to repel questing dark blue noses. 

The second one I went after kept thrashing and dodging until Joker broke its back. By the time I'd stuck Geese in through its eye to pith its brain, the others had already finished the remaining Shadow Dog, and Aila was using her Shield Rune to cast a healing spell at the kid, although I had the feeling he was more hysterical than seriously roughed up. Not too hysterical to stutter out a thank-you, though. 

"So when did we turn into a babysitting service?" Ace muttered as he bent over one of the carcasses. Joker grunted. I shrugged. 

"Give him a break," Aila said. "He's the bravest person we've run into since we left Caleria. Okay, so that's not saying a lot, but still . . ." 

The Karaya always had respected bravery. _At least that explains why she thought he was worth saving._ When she'd sprinted back along the trail, I'd thought for a moment that she'd reverted to being the crazy kid we'd first met outside the old Karaya village, even though I knew that she'd matured in the years she'd been travelling with us . . . although she still had an impulsive streak that I doubted she'd ever outgrow entirely. 

Queen, in the meanwhile, had cocked her head and given the kid a Look. "You were warned not to travel alone when you got your permits, weren't you?" 

"I'm not alone—I'm with you," came the sullen reply. 

"If you'd drifted a little farther back, you'd be dog food," Joker corrected. "If Aila hadn't decided to go back for you, you'd be dog food anyway. We weren't under any obligation to save you, kid." 

"Landon," the kid corrected. 

I sighed. _Travelling with us might get him killed if the Howling Voice shows up again. Then again, it looks like travelling alone_ will _get him killed, and he's too stupid and stubborn to turn back._ "Queen, see to it that the kid keeps up from now on. And when we stop for the night, have him take off his boots so that someone can check his feet. The last thing we need is to have to carry him because he's got infected blisters." 

Queen nodded, but the kid didn't look very happy. "Captain—" 

I gave the kid my best Look, and he wilted. 

"—thank you," he finished. 

"You're learning," Queen said. 

Ace was looking over the last Shadow Wolf carcass by that point, the one Joker and I had killed. "Jacques, Aila, you want to skin this one out? Seems a shame just to take the ears and tail when the pelt's in one piece." 

"Ears and tail?" the kid asked. 

"For the bounty," Joker explained briefly. 

The kid still looked confused. 

It was Ace who gave a long-suffering sigh and went into more detail—mostly, I suspected, because he likes hearing himself talk. "Your Dad doesn't deal much with fighters or hunters, does he? Most road garrisons and military units will pay a bounty for dead monsters—here in Harmonia, the Regular Army's legally required to do it, and Crystal Valley sets the prices, but they do it everywhere else I've ever been, too . . ." 

He gave me a quick glance, and I supplied, "Everywhere I've ever been, too, even Falena. Gaien's stingy about it, and Toran was having problems scraping enough money together for the first couple of years after the revolution, but everyone'll give you something if you can prove that the monster is dead." 

"It's so common that even merchants who deal with people who kill monsters a lot'll treat bounties as though they were potch," Ace finished. "You hand over the ears and tail, or whatever bits you're supposed to carve off the thing to prove that it's dead if it doesn't have ears or a tail, and they'll act like you've paid them the bounty, and even give you change. Pelts off some of the furry critters are worth more, though, if you can get them off in one piece. We'll probably sell this one in this Forestwall place the boss was talking about, if it's big enough." 

"It used to be," I confirmed as Aila and Jacques finished skinning and rolled up the raw hide. "Let's get going. There used to be an inn along this stretch, and if it's still there, I'd like to try to make it before dark." 

We did, just. The place was more run-down than I remembered, but it really had been a long time, and anyway, I didn't much care. It was warm inside and surprisingly vermin- free—probably there wasn't enough traffic through the area anymore to keep the bedbugs fed—and the innkeeper was more than glad to accept a set of Shadow Dog parts as payment for our rooms. And if the stew they served for supper was a bit thin and mostly vegetables, it at least came with lots of bread and a surprisingly decent grade of local ale. 

We had the common room pretty much to ourselves— a couple of locals did show up for a drink after supper, but they sat themselves down in the corner furthest from the table we'd staked out, and muttered into their mugs. We even managed to get rid of the kid after the first after-dinner round, when he nearly planted himself face down among the empties and Ace managed to needle him into going up to bed in the room they'd be sharing. That left us grown-ups alone to settle in for some serious drinking. 

We were just about to start the fourth round when Joker leaned back in his chair and asked, "So, Captain, how did this Prince Varen really die?" 

I glanced at Sasarai, then shrugged—it was all ancient history, really, so why would it matter if he found out? "Of an infected stomach wound," I said succinctly. "In Haddarat, about a month after Iddaran fell to Harmonia. He was hurt in the last bit of fighting around Oerat, and insisted on looking after it himself. By the time anyone else got a look, the rot had already set in." There was no need to explain any more than that— everyone here was familiar with the limitations of runes when it came to healing. Magic can fuse cut or ruptured flesh back together, negate some kinds of poison, and even deal with blood loss to some extent, but it can't heal disease or infections any more than it can make parts of the body that are cut off grow back. 

"And the missing members of this Circle of Six?" 

I swirled the ale in my mug. "One was already dead by that time. I'm not surprised that his body was never found, though—we had to leave it in a secret passageway when we were trying to get the Prince out of the old palace. The other died a couple of weeks later, in a skirmish with bandits near the Safir village—they never knew who they'd killed." 

"'We'," Sasarai quoted. "So you are from around here. I'd wondered—your equipment almost matches drawings I've seen of what the Iddaran Army used to issue its officers. I suppose you've been replacing each item that wears out with the nearest equivalent you can find." 

I shrugged, annoyed by his vaguely patronizing tone. 

"Wonder if the kid noticed that part," Joker said to his mug. 

"Well, if he didn't, we're not going to point it out to him," Queen said firmly. 

"So how does it feel to be home again?" Sasarai added. 

That made my entire team stiffen, not just me. 

" _King_." Joker emphasized the name. "Here's a free piece of advice: there are some questions you just don't ask people like us. You've been treading pretty close to the line for a while now." 

"I'm sorry. It's just that I'm accustomed . . . It's difficult to get ushed— _used_ —to not being in charge," Sasarai said. 

I managed to keep myself from laughing, but it was a close thing—well, as close as it ever gets for me these days. _I'll be damned—he's drunk._ Or borderline, anyway, and trying to hide it. _Guess it just goes to show that having a little wine with your dinner is_ not _the same as an evening at the bar with the SFDF._

"It's jusht . . . There aren't so many people with True Runes, and not so many of ush live to be th'Captain's age, or have any kind of normal life . . ." Sasarai's voice trailed off, and he stared, slightly owlishly, into his mug, as though he'd forgotten what was inside it and was trying to figure that out. 

I drained mine, and set it down on the table with a thump. _He's only about the same age now as I was when True Lightning decided to come to me—it's easy to forget that, because he looks so much younger and yet_ seems _so much older._

"There are others older than me," I pointed out. "Hikusaak, for one." 

Sasarai shook his head again. "Hikusaak . . . doesn' talk much about hish life. Damn, I'm tired." He leaned slowly forward, and Jacques moved his mug out of the way so that he wouldn't wind up spilling it as his head approached the table. "Haven' walked . . . sho far . . . n'ages . . ." 

"Well, at least he doesn't snore," Queen observed after a moment. "Next round's on me." 

We made okay progress the next day, which was even more surprising when you consider that Joker's favourite hangover remedy is hair of the dog that bit him, and did in fact manage to reach Forestwall by dusk on the fourth day since leaving Haddarat. 

That was where the Howling Voice Guild caught up with us again . . . or at least, that's what we thought at first. 

I'd opted to go up to the local garrison with Ace to trade in the assortment of monster bits we'd accumulated on the way there, while the others stayed at the inn to keep an eye on Sasarai and the kid. We'd finished there, and were looking for a place to unload the Shadow Wolf pelt, when a vaguely familiar voice shouted at us to get down. 

I ducked and moved slightly sideways, and a crossbow bolt whined past just above my head to embed itself in the wooden facade of the building across the street. I quickly sidestepped into the entryway of the nearest shop, flattened my back against a wall, and started looking around for the source of the shot. 

There was noise and movement in an alleyway across the street, followed by a grunt of pain and a thud that sounded like a falling body. Then a familiar figure strolled casually out of there into the middle of the street. 

"You can come out now, Captain," Nash said. 

I stepped out of the entryway all right, but I kept my hand on Geese's hilt. I'd never trusted Nash even before he'd admitted he was a spy—I don't trust anyone who has the honey blonde hair and blue eyes of a First Class Citizen until he's earned it, and some of the things I'd found out about Nash in the aftermath of the Second Fire Bringer War made me even less happy about meeting him here. 

"It's good to see you again," the blond added, but I kept on walking right past him and into the alley he'd just emerged from. It had occurred to me by then that a Howling Voice operative would have used a gun, not a crossbow, and I wanted a closer look at the body. 

_Looks like Nash took him in the back,_ was my first observation. The corpse was lying face-down on the ground with a knife between its shoulderblades and a handful of extra bolts scattered around it. The crossbow itself was a common, mass-produced model, and quite new, with no signs of wear that I could see. 

I turned the body over with my foot— _young, male, no one I've ever seen before_ —and prodded at its non- descript clothes with my toe. _No gun._ A quick rifle of the pockets turned up a couple of hundred potch, which I took, and nothing else except lint. 

"Not Howling Voice," Ace observed from behind me. 

"You have the Guild after you?" Nash asked from a little further away. 

"It's a long story," I said. "Do you have any idea who this—" I prodded the corpse again. "—was?" 

"Local rebellion—no one mentioned his name at the meeting I was watching, so I can't be any more precise," Nash said with a shrug. "They'd heard that someone was starting to investigate their weapons smuggling, and wanted to eliminate them before they found out too much. I never guessed you would turn out to be involved—this is a little far from your normal stomping grounds." 

I swore, with feeling. That damned idiot at the fort in Haddarat had better hope that I never saw him again, or I'd have him ground up for dragon-horse fodder. 

"We're not, really," Ace began. 

"We weren't," I corrected briefly. "I want everyone in on this. Go back to the inn and convince the kid to make himself scarce—he doesn't need to be involved. We'll be right behind you." Hopefully, Ace would understand that I wanted him to get "King" under cover as well—Nash was probably working for the Council of Bishops, and would have no trouble at all identifying our companion as Sasarai. 

"I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to be seen with you," Nash began. 

I glared at him. "And I'm not sure it's a good idea for us to be seen with a former First Class Citizen right now, but I don't want to have this conversation standing over a dead body whose friends could show up any minute. You have a choice— come along, or fight me." 

"Are you sure you'd win?" Nash did turn around and start walking, though. 

I shrugged as I stepped over the corpse and out of the alley. "I'd say I have a good chance—if you have Grosser Fluss on you, you've hidden it pretty well." I'd walk to his left, I decided—right now, I trusted him a little more than the random people we'd meet in the street. 

"I guess that fruit salesman in Caleria still gets most of his income from selling information," the blond offered with a smile. 

"There are others in Caleria who remember you, including the Defense Force's records department," I observed neutrally . . . although a lot of my information really had come from the "fruit salesman". "I just had to figure out that your real last name wasn't 'Clovis'." 

The smile never wavered. "The Missus insisted that I change it—the Latkje name has too much baggage attached." 

I shrugged. One of the things I hadn't been able to find out was the name of the woman he'd married, if the whole henpecked husband thing wasn't just an act. 

I lengthened my stride a bit as we came up to the inn, shouldering past Nash so that I could slip through the door first. Joker, Queen, Jacques, Aila, and Ace had taken over an eight- man table in a corner of the common room, and I relaxed when I saw that Sasarai and Landon were nowhere in sight. 

I took the seat to Queen's left, leaned my chair back against the wall, and accepted the mug that Joker handed me. Nash looked a bit annoyed when he noticed that taking either of the two remaining seats would land him with his back to the entrance. In the end, he did the best he could by choosing the one closest to the wall and waving the innkeeper's wife, who was manning the place, over so that he could order something. All he asked for was another mug of the same beer that the rest of us were drinking, but the way he said it, and the way he looked at her while he did it, made the poor woman blush. 

"Better hope I never meet this phantom wife of yours, or she's going to hear all about that," Queen said. "You're as bad as Ace." 

"Hey! I never waste time on the married ones!" Ace protested. Everyone ignored him. 

"My Missus doesn't mind if I look, so long as that's all I do," Nash said mildly. 

Queen gave him a Look. "That isn't the way Chris tells it." 

"Chris—oh, you mean Chris Lightfellow! I was just trying to get her mind off things—I never meant anything by any of it." 

He was lucky he hadn't broken Chris's heart—if he had, I would have broken his head, since Wyatt wasn't around to do it anymore. "Maybe you should tell us what you're doing in Forestwall," I suggested. 

"Looking for rebels, mostly. There's been a lot of unrest in this area for the past few years—but then, you knew that." 

"Tell us anyway." I wrapped both my hands around my mug, and waited. 

"All right, all right. It started in Oerat a little more than two years ago. There've always been little groups of rebels in Iddaran, just like most of the other Third Class provinces, but mostly they just painted graffiti on the outsides of forts, spat at the feet of soldiers on parade—you know the sort of stuff. Two years ago, things started turning nasty—soldiers roughed up or killed, military supplies stolen or set on fire. And then, a few months ago, a member of the Quilos family—they're First Class Citizens—was killed while travelling near here, along with his wife and children." 

"And that's when someone decided to send you to look into things," Joker said. 

"And that's when I was asked to look into things," Nash agreed. "So far, I've found out that the rebels are spread out, well-organized, and have more weapons than could possibly have been in the one armoury they've taken. I take it that's where you guys come in, although I hadn't found anything yet to indicate that they're smuggling stuff up from the south." 

Ace glanced at me. I nodded, and he said, "That was just a spur-of-the-moment cover story—we didn't know there was any real weapons smuggling going on around here." 

Nash blinked. "Then what are you doing here?" 

I shrugged. "Looking into the murders." 

"Without orders, I take it. Or does this have something to do with Sasarai's disappearance?" 

Aila flinched. I said, "I heard he'd been attacked while he was under house arrest and ran off. I can't see how that would have anything to do with this." 

"That's what a lot of people claim," Nash said, "but the truth was that he was never under house arrest—he disappeared before the Council could order it." 

I frowned. "Hmm." So which of them was lying? 

"Your turn now," the blond man added. "How did the Howling Voice come to be hunting you?" 

"The captain interrupted one of them when he was trying to kill someone in Caleria," Ace said. "After that, they burned down the inn we were staying at and tried to kill us as we were on our way out the doors. And we ran into a couple more in Haddarat." 

Nash blinked at me. " _You_ killed a Squire- Class Gunner? By yourself?" 

I shrugged. "You know what they say about old age and treachery. I hit him with a lightning spell, and his gun blew up." 

"Still, something doesn't quite add up," Nash said, frowning. "It doesn't sound like they had an actual contract on you, and yet they're suddenly hunting you? The Howling Voice doesn't normally declare a blood feud just because one of their operatives gets killed—they usually consider it just another one of the hazards of the job—so why . . . ?" 

I pointedly tapped my left forefinger against the back of my right hand. 

"Well, yes, I suppose that's possible," the blond admitted, "but the Guild usually isn't that interested in True Rune-collecting. They leave that to the theocracy. And not too many people in Harmonia know what you have, anyway. Me, Sasarai, Dios . . ." 

"And Yuber, and Albert Silverberg," Queen pointed out. "Those two, I don't think any of us trust further than we could throw them. Yuber especially. And half of Le Buque was present when Luc stole the captain's True Rune." 

Nash shrugged. "Yuber's been missing since the war, but I guess you have a point about the others. So the Guild probably does know . . . but that wouldn't explain why they've waited this long to go after it. No, this has to be something else." 

"If you hear anything that might be of use to us . . ." Ace said, letting the sentence trail off suggestively. 

" . . . I'll tell you, if you'll do the same for me," Nash finished. "I can use all the help I can get right now. Good luck. I'll be in touch as the opportunity presents itself." He drained his mug, set it down, and pushed his chair away from the table. 

"See you," Joker said. 

"So which of them's telling the truth?" Queen asked when Nash had closed the door behind him. 

"Damned if I know," Ace said. "Could Nash be just plain wrong?" 

"It's a possibility, I guess." Queen shifted restlessly in her chair. 

"For what it's worth, it didn't seem to me like either of them was lying," Joker said. 

"Who knows?" I said . . . although personally, if either of them _was_ lying, my bet was on Sasarai. Mind you, that might just be because he'd been rubbing me the wrong way a lot lately. I didn't have any kind of proof for either of them. 

_What in hell is going on here?_


	5. Chapter 5

I knew I was dreaming instantly, because in my dreams, I still have both eyes. Not that there was much to see here—I was standing in the middle of what looked like part of the pass between Caleria and the Grasslands, which is pretty damned boring terrain. If I'd had any idea of where to go, I would have moved on, instead of standing there admiring the combination of scraggly vegetation, rocks, and dirt that surrounded me. Actually, if it had been real, I would have thought I was pretty close to the Caleria end, below where the trail to Le Buque splits off, but given the way geography works in dreams, heading off in that direction might just as easily have landed me underwater as in the fortress town. 

_Ace would probably say that I deserve to be treated the same way by my subconscious mind that I treat him,_ I though with a half-smile as I sat down on a boulder to one side of the trail. _Dreams are not supposed to be this boring, damnit!_

I think I might actually have been there a couple of minutes when I started to hear footsteps. I stood up, drew my sword—which, I noted in passing, was Geese and not her long- vanished-from-the-waking-world predecessor, although the latter is actually more likely to show up in my dreams—and took a step back, into the shadow of the sheer rock wall behind me. None of those precautions were probably _necessary_ , but I figured they couldn't hurt. 

_One person,_ I decided, listening. He came into view a few moments later: Sasarai, dressed as King the mercenary . . . except with a few weird additions. Like the brilliant light shining through his headband, and the little glowing brown-gold dragon that was sticking up out of the back of his right hand. Someone had tied the tiny creature's jaws shut and bound its wings to its body, all with what looked like glowing white thread. Sasarai was also carrying a bulging pack slung over his shoulders, but it didn't look at all odd. 

Then there was a tickle in the back of _my_ right hand, and I looked down to see that I had a little dragon of my own, white-gold with violet eyes. The True Lightning Rune, presumably, although it had never done anything quite like this before. _Trying to tell me something, are you?_

It waved a tiny foreleg at Sasarai's receding back. I sighed. _Want me to follow him, do you? Okay, okay, I'm going._

I was right—what was at the bottom of the pass wasn't Caleria. Well, okay, a few bits of it were, but all in all it looked more like bits of just about every city I'd ever seen had been thrown together in no particular order. The windmill sprouting from the roof of a Karayan tent was especially eye-catching. It looked like some kind of trick picture—Queen would probably have known the exact words to describe the effect, but the only time she'd tried to explain anything like that to me, we'd both been pretty drunk. It was . . . interesting, anyway. 

The people milling around the place didn't seem to notice or care, though . . . and they were just as thoroughly assorted as the city-bits. I spotted representatives of all six Grasslands tribes wandering the open-air market just inside the gate, rubbing shoulders with Zexans and Toranese and people from all corners of Harmonia and someone I thought was probably an Island Nations pirate. 

Sasarai had stopped in the middle of the open space just in front of the gate—that part matched Caleria, anyway—and lowered his pack to the ground so that he could rummage through it. After a moment, he lifted out a good-sized object . . . and my eyes narrowed. _That's one of those things Luc was using to hold the True Runes he stole . . ._ I was too far back to see whether this one contained a miniature dragon like the one sticking out of my hand, though. 

The rune-trap floated in midair at about shoulder height when Sasarai released it. He immediately went back to rummaging in his pack . . . and pulled out another rune-trap. And another. Within a few minutes, he had twenty-four of the things floating in front of him. Then he took a step back, kicking his pack out of the way in the process, and raised his hands. A second later, a flash of light blinded me. 

When my vision had cleared again, Sasarai and the rune-traps were gone. 

So were all the people who'd been wandering around the composite city. 

So were all the colours that had originally been present in the scene. 

I took a step forward, across grey soil that had been reddish tan a moment ago. My little dragon seemed to be trying to stuff its head through the back of my glove. It was still pale gold with violet eyes, and the bits and pieces of my armour and equipment that were made from brown leather were still brown. 

"Guess we're the only real things left here," I said to the dragon. It sounded louder than I'd meant it to . . . maybe because there were no other sounds to buffer it. Even the air here was unnaturally still. 

Hadn't Hugo once described something like this? A silent world, a world without colour . . . something that Luc had shown him, calling it "the World of Dharma"—a world of total order. Now that I thought about it, I might have had nightmares before about this myself. 

"You've shown me this before," I said to the dragon, which still seemed to be trying to hide its face. "Or tried to. Does that mean that Luc was right? That this is where everything ends?" 

The dragon looked up at me, gave me a very human shrug, and wiggled its forepaws in a way that would have meant "maybe" or "it could" if Ace had been doing it. 

Okay, so if this was a message from the True Lightning Rune, _why_ was it showing me all this? Was it expecting me to stop this from happening, somehow? _Kind of a tall order for an ordinary human being._ And what did _Sasarai_ have to do with any of it? Or had I really been seeing Luc, pretending to be Sasarai, which meant that the True Rune was several years late? Or . . . ? 

I was still trying to figure out the _why_ when the dream dissolved. I woke up lying on my back with my arms spread and one leg dangling over the edge of the mattress. _Inn, right. Forestwall._

I drew my leg in and sat up. Then I pulled my right glove off—I always wear the damned thing, except in the bath, so that I can be sure that no one notices the damned True Rune. 

"You're a lot of help," I grumbled at it, and sparks raced briefly over the back of my hand. 

What a companion for one's immortality, I thought, glaring at it. A mute idiot which could only give me information in dreams, which meant that it was impossible to tell which bits of what I had been seeing were actually meaningful and which had been added by my own mind. Luc had seemed to be able to communicate better with his True Rune than I could with True Lightning. I'd have to remember to ask Sasarai how he interacted with True Earth sometime. 

Why had the True Earth Rune been bound and gagged in my dream? And what had that shining thing on Sasarai's forehead been? 

I put my glove on and lay back down, but I couldn't seem to get back to sleep. That dream had really spooked me, in some quiet way. Maybe it was just because it had driven home to me yet another time that bearing a True Rune was a mixed blessing at best. 

Not aging has some obvious advantages . . . but it also meant that I really _might_ be around to see the end of the world. Alone, because practically everyone I knew was going to predecease me. Friends. Lovers . . . although I hadn't had one of those in a long time, on the grounds that a relationship between me and an ordinary woman with no True Rune wouldn't really have been fair to either party. 

_It's probably a good thing that I never wanted children,_ I reflected, staring at my hand. Watching your kids grow from infant to adult, then age and die, grey and wrinkled, while you remained the same . . . I'd always wondered if Wyatt had been entirely honest when he'd claimed that he'd fled Zexay and sealed his True Rune because the Howling Voice was on his tail, and not because of what he would have had to watch time do to Chris. _Ironic, in a way—she's about the same age now as her father was when I first met him._ And the first Flame Champion . . . he had died because he'd valued a lifetime with his loved ones more than an eternity without them. 

I couldn't remember ever having anyone I loved that much. In that way, I was probably more like Sasarai than like the people I considered friends. 

What would Hugo and Chris do with their immortality? Keep it, as I had? Or release it, like the others I had known? 

_Hell, why bother to get all meditative about it? I might die on the point of someone's sword tomorrow, or some idiot somewhere else in the world might succeed in destroying one of the other True Runes and send us all to hell. What happens, happens, and right now I have enough on my plate without worrying about what's going to be happening to me next year, much less a thousand years from now._ For now, I had a job to do, I had responsibilities . . . and I wasn't alone. 

I was quieter than usual at breakfast that morning because I was watching Sasarai . . . or maybe not. No one else seemed to notice that there was anything odd about the way I was acting, so maybe it really was just me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't see any difference between this Sasarai and the one I'd known during the war, nothing that would make me believe in the scenario my dream had presented to me. 

It was raining when we left Forestwall that morning, turning travel into a miserable slog even though we were following the old Sindar roadway that led through the forest to Oerat and not one of the narrow, muddy trails that led away from it at random intervals. Ace, Queen, Joker, and Aila all grumbled good-naturedly while Sasarai, Jacques, and I suffered in silence and Landon cursed and stumbled along behind. 

Truth be told, I was surprised the kid was still with us. I'd expected him to stay in Forestwall after the way I'd had Queen nipping at his heels all the way there, badgering him to keep up. I made a mental note to have someone check him for blisters again—wet weather is horrible for those if your boots don't fit exactly right, and the kid was stubborn enough that he might not complain even if his feet were running blood. 

The next week or so was just as ugly as that first day. The rain never quite went away, so we were constantly damp and ended up muddy to the knees whenever we came across a section of the ancient road that was no longer paved—I'd never noticed before just how many buildings beside the road were built of old paving stones, or maybe that kind of thing had become more common since Harmonia had taken over. At one point, Aila, who still wasn't entirely used to wet-weather travel even after three years with us, stepped into a waist-deep sinkhole by the edge of the road, and by the time we got her out, she and Jacques and Joker were slimed with mud from head to toe and even those of us who had managed to avoid sharing that fate were in a foul mood. We got used to arriving at inns exhausted and long after nightfall, and spending what little energy we had left on maintaining our gear, trying to prevent rust and mold, before we all fell into bed. It was a good thing that the Howling Voice didn't show up again during that part of our travels, because we would have been easy prey. 

Landon kept up with us without complaining much, and even put up with Ace's lame jokes. ("Why would mercenaries rather fight monsters than march in this kind of weather? . . . At least you can kill a monster!") I was really starting to wonder about that kid, because it seemed more and more like he was staying with us for a reason . . . but I didn't know what to do about it. Knifing him and leaving his body under a drift of forest leaves was out of the question—I don't murder innocents, and there was still a chance that he might be just a stupid, stubborn kid who didn't know when someone was trying to get rid of him. Or he might be a spy sent to keep an eye on us—probably by the rebels, although I wouldn't have considered the Howling Voice out of the question. The kid who'd attacked us in Haddarat hadn't been any older. 

Nine days after leaving Forestwall, we staggered into Oerat, drenched and miserable. Or, more accurately, we staggered _up to_ Oerat, because the Harmonians had rebuilt the old city walls that they'd done such a number on when they'd conquered the place, and set up a checkpoint at the gate. Fortunately, given the weather, there weren't many people waiting to get into the city . . . but unfortunately, our little group was kind of distinctive. 

I'd been expecting the questions about what an SFDF unit was doing this far north, but it was worse than that: the guards were looking to pick a fight. It started going bad the moment Ace told them who we were . . . although at least he didn't try the "travelling circus performers" story this time. 

"Defense Force? _Here?_ Tell us another one." The guard sniggered. "And I suppose you're the captain." 

"I'm the captain." I cut off whatever Ace had been about to say. This wasn't time for a smartass remark. Okay, so there were only four guards visible, but I'd have bet a thousand potch to a Failure Urn that there were more sitting somewhere out of the rain but close enough to back them up if there was trouble. 

"You?" The guard stared at me; I returned the favour, noting the ground-in stains on his uniform, the dull metal of his halberd, and the slight potbelly—the garrison commander here clearly wasn't keeping proper discipline. 

You would have thought Potbelly would have been able to win a staring contest with me—he had two eyes, so he only had to stare half as hard—but it only took me a few seconds to make him wilt slightly. But that didn't keep him from snickering when the tall, thin guard behind him said, "Get a load of what this guy's wearing—I wonder if his family ran away before or after we took over?" 

Queen grabbed Aila's arm as she began to reach over her shoulder for an arrow, and shook her head. 

"Are you done?" I asked, trying to sound as absolutely bored as possible. It wasn't very hard—I'd taken part in this scene hundreds of times over the years, and the significant points never change. The worst part of it is that the would-be bullies always think they're being original. 

"You'll have to hand over your weapons if you want in," Potbelly said. "They're not allowed inside the city." 

"That's funny," Joker said. "I don't see _you_ bunking outside." 

"We're Regular Army," Rail-Thin said, "not lying mercenary trash." 

_Damn, they're just not going to let it drop._ My hand went to Geese's hilt, and this time, Queen didn't stop Aila from reaching for an arrow—she was too busy loosening her sword in its scabbard. Four of them, with halberds and daggers . . . My eye flickered around, noting positions. Six of us, with various weapons—I didn't count Sasarai or the kid. Aila and Jacques had backed off slightly, to give themselves room to aim. Question was, could we drop them all and get through the gates quickly enough to avoid being stopped by their reinforcements, and would the several locals watching all this inform on us if we did? 

"What's going on here?" 

I relaxed fractionally as a fifth guard stepped through a doorway that was built into the wall inside the gate arch. This one was older, wearing sergeant's stripes, and his kit was properly maintained. 

"These people refuse to surrender their weapons, Sarge," Potbelly explained. "Claim they're Unit Twelve of the Southern Frontier Defense Force." 

"Really." The sergeant eyed us. "A little far from home, aren't you?" 

"It happens," Ace said with a shrug. "Look, we're not trying to make trouble—we just need to follow up on something here." 

The sergeant hesitated a moment, then said, "All right, I'll take you to see the duty captain, and you can make your case to him." 

Ace spread his hands expressively. "That's all we ask." 

The sergeant gestured to us to precede him through the doorway he'd emerged from, which opened on a narrow flight of stairs. We filed through, Ace first, then me, then Sasarai and the archers, with Queen and Joker bringing up the rear. I stopped halfway up the stairs when I heard some kind of scuffle going on below. 

"Is there a problem?" I asked. 

"Just some kid trying to follow us," the sergeant said. "Local, from the looks of him. I figured he couldn't be with you guys, so I sent him packing." 

So much for Landon. 

Another door at the top of the staircase took us out onto the battlements. 

"Captain's office is in the west tower," the sergeant explained, waving us on. 

"Never going to get used to these stonepiles," Aila mumbled right behind me. A glance back over my shoulder showed her looking fixedly down at her feet. Well, she _had_ grown up in the middle of a pancake-flat plain, so it made sense that anything higher off the ground than a horse's back might make her just a little bit nervous. 

It was actually pretty interesting stonework, now that I looked at it—sort of polka-dot, half the stones the original creamy grey, while others had been blackened by magical fire, long ago . . . 

Just outside the tower, the sergeant squeezed past us to open the heavy oak door and duck in to explain what was going on, while we stood out in the drizzle. 

"Some hospitality," Ace muttered, and got snapped at by Queen. 

"Shut up—we're all wet too." 

"Yeah, yeah—sorry." 

"Forget about mold growing on my clothes—if this doesn't stop soon, it's going to be growing on _me_ ," Aila mumbled. 

I sighed, and reflected that I was going to have to oil Geese again tonight—I never have trusted her scabbard to keep her completely dry. 

Finally, the door opened again, and the sergeant beckoned us inside. 

"About time," Ace said, and led the way. 

The duty captain's office, it turned out, took up an entire floor of the tower—which was just as well, because otherwise, it would have felt kind of cramped with seven damp and irritated mercenaries in it. The big, scarred desk behind which the captain sat took up enough space for a small office in and of itself, in my opinion. 

The captain himself rose to his feet as we entered—a shortish, slender, black-haired man with First-Class-Citizen-blue eyes, who looked awfully young for the amount of scrambled eggs on his uniform—and bowed to me as though to an equal, which was a surprise. 

"Captain Geddoe—it's a pleasure to meet you." 

Behind me, on my blind side, I heard the sound of someone's weapon being drawn, and held up an arm to keep that person from doing something stupid like charging forward and skewering this man. 

"I don't remember telling your man my name," I said mildly. 

The captain smiled. "A few promotions ago, I was in charge of filing the duplicate reports the Defense Force sends to Crystal Valley. Some of them were pretty interesting reading. If you don't mind, I'd like to talk to you a bit—please, sit down." 

The furniture wasn't the best, and didn't match, but at least there was enough for all of us. The captain even dragged his chair around to our side of the desk, and sent the sergeant for some tea—going out of his way to be hospitable, I realized. _Wonder what he wants from us?_

"You don't have to answer if you don't want to," he said, "but I hope you're here about the weapons smuggling. We've been having some nasty problems lately—sentries shot from a distance with heavy crossbows, that sort of thing." 

"We'd heard there'd been a few deaths," Joker admitted. 

"We intend to look into it, anyway," I added. Until we found out what was going on, I intended to look into everything even remotely unusual in the entire damned region, on the theory that, if you turn over enough rocks, you'll find a worm eventually. "You mind telling us what you know?" 

The captain shrugged. "Not much, unfortunately. I'm the only person in the garrison that could remotely be considered local, and even I'm not exactly popular here—my mother was the mistress of the last provincial governor." _And you're his son,_ I translated. That explained the blue eyes, anyway. "Most of the men are short-timers. We don't have any good links into the rebel organization." 

"How about bad ones?" Queen asked. 

"Well . . . a few. We did manage to capture the rebels' leader a few days ago, but he hasn't talked yet. Since then, they seem to have split into several groups and gone to ground. We're not sure how many of them are actually involved in the smuggling, or the killings—my gut feeling is that it's probably only a few groups, maybe even just one, but which ones, and where they're getting the weapons from . . ." He shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. 

"The weapons could be coming from anywhere," Joker said. "Just about everyone who has a border with Holy Harmonia would like her to keep her attention firmly at home— the Zexens, the more militant Grasslands tribes, Dunan . . . hell, it might even be Toran or one of those little dots on the map up in the north." 

Aila shook her head. "The Grasslands have had enough of war for now." 

"Um, Aila . . . that's kind of the point," Ace said. 

"And anyway, we're not that devious," the girl added. And _that_ was true enough—I'd known a lot of Grasslanders, and almost none of them thought in the kind of tortuous circles all of this suggested. That seemed to be more of a . . . civilized . . . thing. 

The tea arrived just then, breaking what might have become a dangerous silence. It wasn't really very good tea, mind you, but it was hot, and that helped. 

"Anyway, when all's said and done, you have a better chance of getting some kind of information than I do," the captain said after everyone had poured enough hot water down the insides of them to help with the cold water still dampening the outsides. "You especially, Captain Geddoe. I mean . . . your family must be from somewhere around here." 

I shrugged. "Don't ask me." 

"It's pointless to deny it—even your armour matches what the old Principality used to issue its army officers. Whoever you inherited it from has to have been from this area." 

Another shrug. "It's good armour—that's why I wear it." 

Ace snorted. "I say the two of you have to be related somehow—you're both equally tactless." 

The captain winced. "Sorry—it's those damned reports. I feel like I've known you people for years, even though we've never met before." 

"Hey, hey," Ace said. "I didn't say I was offended." 

"Actually, it's kind of nice, having a Regular be this honest with us," Queen added. "It doesn't happen often." 

"Then . . . if you hear anything . . ." 

"We'll probably pass it on," I said. 

"If you tell us who to pass it on _to_ ," Ace added. 

"Sorry. Kiraym Andquist." The captain made a little seated bow. "And . . . I know most of you, but not you—" He nodded to Sasarai. "—or the young Karaya lady—Aila, was it?" 

"Yeah, and that's King." The "young Karaya lady" sipped her tea almost prissily. 

"I like him—he's kind of cute, for a Bluecoat," Aila added twenty minutes or so later as we were all on our way back downstairs toward the gate. 

"Cute, but too pushy," Queen said. "Ace, have you ever actually described us in those reports in enough detail that he could identify us from them?" 

"Worse," Joker said before Ace could answer. "He draws caricatures, or at least he did until I caught him. They were more than good enough that someone could have identified you, me, him, or the captain from them." 

"We clerical types are just a superior breed," Ace said as everyone stopped for a moment to stare at him. 

Queen smiled slowly. "Really? Then why did Elaine dump you?" 

"She found out who I worked for," Ace said morosely as Joker stifled a laugh. 

We clattered the rest of the way down, and then out into the rain, only to be greeted by . . . 

"What took you guys so long? I was starting to think you'd gotten arrested!" 

And I'd been starting to hope that we'd finally rid ourselves of Landon, but there he was, standing in someone's doorway, large as life and twice as wet. And I still couldn't tell if he was a spy—he _might_ just have wanted something familiar to keep him company in the big city, even if the "something" was a group of people who considered him a nuisance, teased him, and subjected him to mildly humiliating personal inspections. 

I sighed. "Let's find an inn."


	6. Chapter 6

A lot of the buildings I remembered were still there, but the patterns of wealth in the city had shifted—the old palace was now the army headquarters, and the Harmonian governor lived in a mansion at the extreme north end of the city, lower- middle-class in my day, so the old nobles' mansions in the west- central district were vacant or being used as tenements . . . or inns. We picked one on the fringes of the area that looked like it was probably clean and wouldn't water the drinks, and made ourselves at home. 

" . . . You look for a place that keeps the front steps clean and the sign painted, but doesn't have any extra frills like stained glass or fancy mosaics," Ace was explaining to Landon as we all headed down to the common room for a drink. "If they bother to clean the front steps, they'll probably clean the insides, too. Sign in good condition means they're taking in enough money to get someone to repaint it now and again, and they care enough about their business to bother. Too many frills means they're aiming upmarket, though, and people like us can't afford to stay at places like that too often." Not that the kid was ever likely to have a use again for Ace's Guidelines on Assessing Cheap Inns, but Landon _had_ been dumb enough to ask. 

"Don't you have any kind of a permanent home?" 

Everyone sort of chuckled. 

"There's a barracks in Caleria that belongs to the Defense Force, but no one stays there unless they're really down on their luck," Joker said. "Why, you thinking of joining up?" 

Landon flushed. "I'm just curious, okay?" 

"Good," Joker said seriously, "'cause you're not cut out for it, even if we don't seem to be able to get rid of you." 

The kid scowled and seemed about to say something, but Ace beat him to it. "Ease up on him, okay? I've gotten kind of used to having a mascot, and Aila's gotten too old for the part." 

Aila rolled her eyes. "Thank the spirits. Does this mean you'll let me sign on as a full member soon?" 

"Well . . ." 

The kid was still wearing a sour kind of expression, but he didn't say anything more— _probably trying to decide whether 'mascot' is a step up from 'nuisance' or not,_ I thought, as we gathered around two tables in the far corner of the common room. 

I didn't notice that there was anything strange about my chair until I grabbed the back and dragged it out, intending to swap it with a stool from one of the other tables so that I didn't have to take Geese off my belt before sitting down. I barely saw the flicker of light and movement in time to escape with a scored glove rather than a punctured hand. 

Queen's sword hissed out and slammed down, and the chair, which hadn't been in the best of shape to start with, fell apart into two pieces . . . as did the creature that had been coiled on it, waiting. 

"What the _hell_?" Ace asked no one in particular as we watched the two separately thrashing bits of snake slowly change colour from chair-wood brown to dark green. 

Joker prodded the back half of the thing with his foot. "A chameleon snake? Isn't this just a little far north for those?" 

Queen was a little less decorous—she stamped on the front half right behind the head, then bent down for a better look. "A chameleon snake with a Venom Rune on it. Whoever it bit would have been sick for days—dead, without the proper treatment, although with so many of us carrying runes there wouldn't have been much risk of that here." 

"So someone was trying to keep us here," Sasarai said slowly. 

"And I'll give you three guesses as to who it was," Ace said. "Question is, do we move?" 

"Would it do any good?" Joker asked. "At least this way, we know that they know we're here. At the next place, we couldn't be sure." He examined his chair closely, then, apparently content that it was snake-free, sat down. 

Ace snorted. "You just don't want to have to wait for your drink." 

"That too," Joker admitted. "Got a problem with that?" 

Landon was still kind of staring at the snake, and his mouth was moving without any sound coming out. Queen grabbed him by the shoulder. 

"Sit down, kid," she ordered, steering him to a chair. "Put your head down—that's it." 

"You people are crazy," Landon said. "How can you be so calm about this?" 

"Told you you weren't cut out for the Defense Force," Joker said. "This is all in a day's work, just like monsters on the trail." 

"Yeah, but you can see the monsters coming. This isn't—you guys are as crazy as my sister!" 

"So what does that make you for sticking with us when we tried to get rid of you?" Aila asked. "Dammit, I want a soda! What do you have to do to get some service around here?" 

"Not killing invisible snakes in the middle of the common room might help," Queen suggested dryly. 

"What is it about your sister that makes her so crazy?" I asked. It might turn out to be nothing—probably was—but I had a hunch . . . 

The kid made a face. "My parents threw her out of the house when she was stupid enough to tell them that she'd joined the rebellion." 

_Bingo._ "And you weren't stupid enough to tell them when you did," I said. 

Landon looked at me sullenly and didn't answer. 

"So now we know how they knew we were in Forestwall," Ace said, glaring at the kid. "And here, too, probably—did you like the present they sent us?" 

Joker snorted. "Use your brain for once—you think a local resistance movement would waste money shipping exotic snakes in from southern Toran and equipping them with runes? This must've been our other friends." 

The kid shook his head, still sulking. "I told them when I got here that the smuggling investigation thing was a fake- -I'd figured that much out by then—and they said they'd call everyone off. Besides, _I_ might have sat on that snake, and they wouldn't risk killing me." 

_Sure they wouldn't, kid. And they probably don't want to win, either. Boy, have you got a lot to learn._

"So, can you get us in to talk to someone a little higher up?" Queen asked. "It'd be nice to get all this properly cleared up so we wouldn't have to keep looking over our shoulders for your people anymore." 

Landon shrugged. "I can ask, but there's been some trouble lately, and everyone's kind of busy, so it'll take at least a day or two." 

"Then we won't be going anywhere tonight, for a change," said Joker. "Good. I'm going to go grab the bartender and squeeze a little liquid refreshment out of him." 

"I don't think that's a good—" Ace began. 

"Let him be," Queen interrupted. "I'll stand watch alone with King, if I have to." 

The expression that flickered across Sasarai's face was gone too quickly for me to tell what it had been, but I didn't like it . . . but I knew I was more likely to jump at shadows when I was tired, too. 

Joker, meanwhile, was already halfway to the bar, so I doubt he'd heard what Queen had said anyway. 

I wouldn't exactly call it a good evening—we were all too keyed up and too sober, and Ace got sulky and sat on the purse strings, which meant that the rest of us were paying out of our own pockets. Besides, it turned out that the best cheap drink that the inn had was hard cider, which wasn't exactly anybody's favourite tipple, although Joker drank it anyway. The rest of us shelled out a little extra for something better (or, in Sasarai's case, stuck with water) and got either quieter or more snappish as the evening wore on, depending. 

We all went to bed early . . . except Landon, who'd gone out at sunset and wasn't back yet when the rest of us turned in. I didn't worry about it—we weren't the kid's keepers, and if he showed up in the middle of the night, whoever was on guard would tell me in the morning. 

But by breakfast, the kid still wasn't there. 

"Good riddance," Ace opined through a mouthful of eggs. 

"Speak for yourself," Queen replied, waving her toast. "He might not have been much good to us otherwise, but we don't have any other links to the rebellion . . . unless someone's been hiding something." 

"Not me," Ace said. 

"You're just sulking because no one else ever listens to you." Aila was always disgustingly awake at breakfasttime, probably because she never had a hangover to deal with. 

Ace blinked. "You don't?" 

"Only when we can't run away fast enough," Joker said. 

Ace put down his fork with a clatter. "That's it—from now on, the company isn't paying your bar tab!" 

"You'd rather have him grouchy all the time because he's sober?" Queen asked. 

Ace seemed to consider that. "Damn, you're right," he said after a moment, and picked up his fork again. 

"So what's the drill for today, anyway?" Queen asked. "We can't just sit around here all day getting drunk." 

"We can't?" Joker said. 

"Well, okay, we could, but it seems like a waste." 

"We'll attract attention if we go out and wander around the city," Sasarai pointed out. 

"We'll do that just sitting here," Ace pointed out. Which was true—even if we'd been willing to leave our weapons in our rooms, most of us stood out one way or the other: my eyepatch and armour, Aila's dark skin, Jacques', Ace's, and Sasarai's lighter hair colour in a land where most people were as dark as me . . . Even Queen and Joker weren't exactly inconspicuous, given the way they dressed and carried themselves. 

"So we go out, have a look around, maybe ask questions, and generally act nosy," Queen said. "Sounds like fun." 

Fun? Well . . . maybe. For them. Exploring an unfamiliar city often is. In my case, I had a feeling it was going to be . . . not painful, exactly, but strange. 

Outside, it was drizzling again—typical autumn weather. I'd almost forgotten that, during my years in the south. Fortunately, it wasn't windy, since even a light breeze can cut like a knife when you're wet. What the weather did do, though, was turn the entire city grey. Greyer. Okay, so even in the old days there hadn't been much brightly-coloured stuff visible outdoors in Oerat in autumn, but you'd been able to see the occasional flash of _something_ , bright clothing becoming visible for an instant through a gap in a heavy grey cloak, a freshly-painted shop sign . . . but none of the signs I saw had been repainted in years, and even the most prosperous-looking people that we passed were wearing dark, dull-coloured clothes. It was as though everyone was afraid of calling attention to themselves. There had once been trees along some of the wider streets and in the public squares, too, which would have been in full autumn colour about then, but they'd been cut down for firewood during the siege eighty years ago, and the few attempts at replanting weren't doing very well. 

"It's like the whole city's just . . . given up," Aila said not long after we left the inn. 

Queen looked around thoughtfully. "In a way, maybe it has. These people . . . they don't really _want_ to be Harmonian—no Third Class Citizen ever does—but at the same time, they don't remember how to be anything else." 

Aila shook her head. "I guess I never will understand how you can forget something like that." 

"Anyway," Ace said, "we need to find somewhere where people are talking to each other—everyone around here seems to be in a hurry to get where they're going, and I doubt they'd appreciate me trying to chat them up." 

"That's never stopped you before," Queen said. Then, before Ace could respond, "We need a market, I guess—it's too early to find anyone worth talking to in a bar. Captain?" 

"The largest one used to be by the river docks," I said, jerking my chin in the appropriate direction. 

It was still there, but one of the streets that had led to it wasn't, so it took us a little longer to find it than I had expected. By the time we made it there, I was almost— _almost_ — used to the way that no one in the streets would meet our eyes once they noticed that we were armed . . . or maybe it was the way we were dressed, or Jacques' yellow hair, even though it was too light to make him really look like a First Class. 

"Not as busy as the one in Vinay del Zexay," Ace observed as we stood on the edge of the square. 

Not as crowded as I remembered it, either. Oh, it wasn't _empty_ , but there was enough space in the square for twice as many stalls as it now held, and I could remember when all that space had been occupied. 

"It used to be a lot busier, stranger," said a voice from behind us. We all turned—not too quickly, so as not to startle whoever it was—and found ourselves facing a man with silver- streaked medium-brown hair and a lined, weathered face. He was wearing an oilskin poncho over his clothes rather than one of the woolen cloaks that had always been so common here, and from that and his accent, I guessed that he was a sailor off some river barge. "The trade never picked up again after the army came through . . . or so my Dad always said, though he weren't but a nipper in those days." 

"You up from the coast?" I asked. 

"Yeah—last run before winter. Be glad when I'm on my way back down. Not much of a place, this." 

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Aila looking indignant, and Queen grabbing her by the shoulder and shaking her head. 

"What about you?" asked the sailor. "Begging your pardon, but most of you don't exactly look local." His eyes did linger on me as he said that, though. 

"Southern Frontier Defense Force Unit Twelve, up from Caleria to investigate the local rebellion," Ace explained briefly. 

The sailor pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. "Heard tell that'd gotten nasty, but I didn't know it was so bad that they'd pulled you guys up here." 

"Are you kidding?" Ace said with a grin. "The Regular Army couldn't figure out how to wipe their noses without us." The sailor snorted and half-smiled himself, then sobered quickly when Ace added, "Heard anything?" 

"Not much that'd be useful to you. Some people say that they're going to break up soon, now that their leader's in jail. Others say they're going to attack the garrison to get him back. A few claim they're going to go south to the Grasslands to look for the True Lightning Rune as supposedly showed up there a while ago. And most think that they're just going to continue on as they have been, killing soldiers whenever they can catch 'em alone. And I've got to admit, some of the garrison here . . . it just couldn't happen to nicer people, y'know?" 

"That bad?" Queen asked. 

"Let's just say that I wouldn't bring my wife here—or my boy, neither, when he was younger. You look like you can take care of yourself, though." 

"I think I can manage," Queen said amusedly. "Thanks for your time." 

"Bet they'd be surprised to find out where the True Lightning Rune really is," Ace muttered once the man was out of earshot. 

"Shut up, you fool," Joker said, which triggered a familiar back-and-forth. 

Anyway, the sailor's remarks were about the most useful thing we heard until noon or so . . . and actually, I wouldn't call what happened then "useful", exactly, either, but there was pretty much no way we could have avoided getting involved. 

We'd been hanging out under the roof-overhang of a boarded-up building near the edge of the market for a couple of hours, trying to be inconspicuous, when a trio of blue-clad guards showed up—our old friend Pot-Belly, his rail-thin friend, and a third man who was about as good at keeping his uniform clean and his metalwork polished as they were. 

As far as I could tell, they didn't notice us . . . or at least, they were a lot more interested in the other inhabitants of the square. The drizzle had tapered off and the sun was finally showing its face, which meant that it had warmed up to the point that a lot of people had pushed their cloaks back over their shoulders. Some of those people were female, young . . . even pretty . . . and the trio made a beeline for the nearest one, who might have been all of sixteen. 

We couldn't hear their conversation with her, but I expect that any of us could have provided the outline. We all exchanged disgusted looks, but no one said anything until Pot- Belly grabbed the young woman by the wrist and began dragging her towards the alley between the building we were standing next to and the battered inn next door. And even then, Ace waited until they were quite close—I think he was hoping, much as I was, that someone else would intervene, but the locals just backed away from the trio in blue and their victim. 

"Hey! Just what do you three think you're doing?" 

"You again!" Potbelly snarled back. "Keep your nose out of this, Defense Force." 

"We can't do that," Ace said. "The lady clearly doesn't want to go with you." 

The third blue-clad man, the one we hadn't seen before, smiled nastily, showing us that he was missing several teeth. "What does it matter? The bitch is just another Third Class." 

"We can't let you go around thinking of yourselves as better than us when you're too hopeless to even get girls without attacking them three-on-one," Ace replied. "It's against our religion." 

"I'll ram that smartass attitude of yours back down your throat!" 

I sighed and drew Geese. I'd had a funny feeling it was going to come to this eventually. 

Three soft garrison soldiers versus six mercenaries who had been involved in practically every southern flare-up in the past ten years didn't make for much of a fight, really. I had Potbelly on his back on the ground with my foot on his chest and Geese's point at his throat before I was even breathing hard. 

"If I were you, I'd stay in your barracks until we leave town," Joker said to them from where he had Rail-Thin pinned up against a wall with his feet off the ground. "I doubt we'll be able to make Queen go so easy on you the next time." 

Queen, however, wasn't paying any attention to him— instead she was helping the girl they'd been manhandling get up. "Are you all right?" 

The girl wouldn't meet her eyes. At first, she wouldn't say anything, either, until we let Potbelly and his friends get up and run away into the crowd. Then she said, softly, staring at the ground, "I know you meant to help, but I wish you hadn't done that." 

Aila blinked. "Huh? Why not?" 

"Because ten years ago, they took my brother away to Crystal Valley," the girl whispered. "If those men find that out, they might . . ." Tears glimmered in her eyes. 

"Try not to worry too much about that," Queen said. "It's probably us they'll remember, and not you. To them, you're just another Third Class Citizen—invisible. And even if they do remember you well enough to find out who you are, I doubt they can convince whatever snooty First Class noble has your brother that he should do anything nasty to him. So cheer up." 

"I hope you're right," the girl said. "But the rebels make promises like that too, and . . ." She shook her head. 

"That wasn't a promise," Queen said with a smile. "That was a prediction." 

"We run into a lot of garrison soldiers," I added, and the girl glanced up at me for a moment . . . which was what I'd been hoping for, actually. She didn't _quite_ do anything I could describe as a double-take, but it was pretty clear that she was surprised to see someone who looked like me in armed company, and carrying a weapon myself. I mentally crossed my fingers, and added, "What do you know about the rebels?" 

"Just what everyone else knows," she said. "That they _say_ they're fighting for all of us to be free . . . but if it means losing my brother, I don't _want_ to be free. And if they fight and lose, we'll _never_ be free. They'll take my children from me the way they took my brother." 

I nodded to show that I understood. Holy Harmonia doesn't like her Third Class Citizens to rebel. Normally, it takes a Third Class province a hundred years to rise to Second Class, but if the local population starts a civil war, the government restarts the clock from zero. 

"You should probably go home," Queen added to her. The girl nodded and started to walk away . . . but stopped for a moment a few steps away to glance back at us over her shoulder before continuing on. 

"It looks like at least some of the people around here understand the realities of their situation," Sasarai observed once the girl was out of earshot. 

Ace snorted. "What, that Harmonia doesn't like to give up what it's conquered? Doesn't exactly take a genius to figure that out." 

"Anyway," Joker said, "it's time for lunch, and I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to have it standing up at a market stall. Let's go back to the inn." 

"Sure, we'll be respectful of your old bones," said Ace. 

It might have stopped raining for the time being, but there was still water all over the streets . . . the cobblestone ones, anyway, and we did our best to keep to those. The alleyways all looked like they were knee-deep in mud. 

"We're not really dressed for this weather," Queen remarked as we all splashed through one particularly large puddle. "Just about everyone I've seen today has been wearing a cloak, and the ones who weren't were pretty clearly outsiders like us." 

"We should buy something," Aila said. 

"Women!" Ace said, throwing up his hands. "They'll take any opportunity to go shopping." 

Queen snorted. "Like you aren't as blue in the face as the rest of us." 

"You'd think he'd be worried about some important bits freezing off," Joker added. 

"Okay, I give up! We'll go shopping. Whatever. It isn't like we have anywhere in particular to be." Ace kicked a pebble, sending it rolling into the gutter. 

I sympathized with his frustration—I've never been fond of waiting either, and though we might try to pretend otherwise, that was basically what we'd been doing all morning. Well, okay, we might have just barely enough information now to attract the attention of the rebels if we played things just right, but . . . 

A bang and a whine interrupted my train of thought. 

"Damn! Everyone over here." Ace beat me to it by about half a second. 

The nearest shelter was an alleyway, but we didn't all make it there quite quickly enough. Another bang, fainter, was followed by a vile curse from Joker, who clutched at his arm as he staggered the last few feet, ending that by slipping on the layer of muddy refuse the rest of us were standing in. He would have landed on his face if Ace hadn't caught him. 

"How many of them are there?" Aila asked. 

"More than one," Queen replied grimly, and began casting Healing Wind on Joker. 

"We can't stay here," Ace added. "Back along the alley, I guess—we can't go back out into the street, either." 

And even the alley wasn't likely to shelter us for long— that second shot had come from a rooftop—but it was the best chance we had, and we all knew it. 

"Door," Joker reported a few seconds later, and everyone's spirits rose a bit until he added, "Locked, and too solid to brea—Damn!" 

The "damn" probably slipped out because the door picked exactly that moment to open . . . and the person on the other side was kind of familiar. 

"Thanks, kid," Ace said to Landon as he almost knocked him down. "You might just have saved our asses." 

I was the last in, and I slammed the door shut and barred it behind us. 

"That won't hold them for long if they really want to get in here," Joker said. "Is there another way out?" 

I glanced around. The place wasn't well-lit, but it looked like it had been some kind of small shop at one time. The half-rotted wooden stairs along the far wall probably led up to what had been the owner's living quarters, but I doubted they would hold even Aila's weight now. Boarded windows . . . There was a front door, but it opened back onto the street we had just escaped, and anyway, it had been boarded shut too. But the floor was oddly dustless . . . some sort of rebel hideout, or at least a meeting-place or message drop? 

Before Landon could answer him, the door we'd entered by started glowing and turning orange. _Fire spell. Damn._ Most of the building was stone, and an empty shell, so we weren't going to have a repeat of the trapped-inside-a- burning-building scenario from Caleria, but we _were_ going to have a whole lot of company soon. 

We arranged ourselves almost automatically—Queen and I on the hinge side of the door, Joker and Ace on the latch side, with a clear field of fire in between for the archers. Sasarai hesitated a moment, then stepped back behind Jacques and Aila and began casting something that I hoped wasn't Earthquake, because only a fool uses that one inside a building. Then there was no more time for thought. 

The doorway forced them to come through one at a time, and the light wasn't good enough for them to hit anything with their guns except by random chance, which meant that we had the advantage for the time being, but that would only last until they found one of the other entrances. We had to kill this batch before then, and the one-at-a-time thing actually made that harder, as did the fact that no one dared step out into the alley. 

The archers took the first one, but the second one got there faster than Jacques could reload, and Aila only managed to hit him in the arm, so he staggered and kept coming until Ace engaged him from the front and Queen ran him through from behind. Unaimed bullets seemed to be everywhere, and pure luck saw the third man get hit in the back of the head by friendly fire. The fourth . . . The fifth . . . Some of them had armour, or different weapons, but they all blurred together in my mind as I twisted and dodged and cut. I didn't bother looking at faces, except in passing, to use as targets. They were Howling Voice, and that was all that mattered. 

"Captain!" The kid was so nervous that his voice cracked and went soprano as he shouted. I swore, ducked to hamstring the man I was fighting, and disengaged so that I could turn to see what he was shouting about. 

The boards on the front door were glowing orange. 

_Shit. This is it._ I took several quick steps backward and began to cast Hammer of Raijin—the most powerful lightning spell there is, available to me courtesy of the True Rune—on the principle that the best thing to do was hit 'em fast, hit 'em hard, and hope that, afterwards, they stayed down and the building stayed up. What in hell was Sasarai trying to cast, anyway, and why was it taking him so long? Surely someone who'd been born with the True Earth Rune would have even better skills with earth magic than I did with lightning . . . 

The boards barring the front door crumbled into embers, and I focused my spell, preparing to release it . . . only to have to abort it abruptly as I realized there was only one person on the other side, a familiar person who was holding his empty hands up and out so that we could see them. 

Nash Latkje. Clovis. Whatever his name was. 

The last of the guys who'd come in by the side door went down under Queen's sword just then, and we all just stood there for a moment, breathing hard and staring at each other— well, Nash was staring at Sasarai, mostly. 

Nash was also the first to say something. "We need to get out of here. Those guys were just meant to pin you down while one of them went for their boss, and believe me, none of us want to be here when she shows up." 

"How many were out front?" Joker asked. 

"Three—quit wasting time!" Nash's eyes darted around the room. 

"Maybe we'd better leave the way I came in." Landon was pale, but his voice didn't crack again. "There's a trapdoor under the stairs that leads to the tunnels." 

"The sewers?" Ace asked. "Damn—didn't we have enough of that in Tinto last year?" 

I shook my head. "I expect it's the other tunnels. Let's get moving." 

The trapdoor was only big enough for one person at a time. Landon went first, and I gestured for Sasarai to follow him. Nash stood watch in the middle of the floor, his eyes darting from one open door to the other. 

I went down next to last—actually, I had to push Ace, who was still mumbling about sewers even though, if he'd stopped to _think_ for a second, he would have realized that the air coming up from the opening smelled damp and stale, but not foul. When my turn came, I swung myself over and down without hesitation, ignoring the ladder bolted to the side of the opening. 

The low-ceilinged room down below had been a cellar at one point—the light of the lantern whose glass chimney Landon was just fitting into place made that clear—but now there was a hole in one brick wall that opened into a different space with a lower floor level. Queen had already gone down into it, and Ace was standing nearby, staring through the opening. This time, I pushed past him instead of just pushing him . . . and nearly broke my leg stepping down when the height difference between the two floor levels turned out to be more than I had expected. 

As far as I could tell, my surroundings were pretty much what I had thought they would be—a smallish alcove with a doorway framing the irregular debricked opening that led back into the cellar. Walls, floor, and ceiling were of solid stone—well, okay, _solid_ was maybe a bit much. There were cracks in the floor, and while the ceiling seemed to be in good enough shape just here, when I stuck my head out into the hallway that the alcove led off of, I could just barely see a timber propping up the roof some ten feet to my right. 

Queen was tracing a bit of carving on one of the walls. "This is a Sindar ruin, isn't it?" she asked as I came up behind her. 

"Part of one," I agreed. 

"How much more is there?" 

I shrugged. "No one really knows—a lot of it's collapsed, and there's some that used to go under the river and got flooded out. There's enough that someone used to find a new bit every few years, digging cellars or foundations." 

"So the entire city's built on top of . . . this?" 

"Pretty much," I agreed. 

"This is no time to sightsee," Nash said as he dropped the foot and a half into the alcove. 

"What has you so spooked?" Joker asked as he followed. "Is this boss lady really that nasty? Or . . . this isn't your wife we're talking about, is it?" 

"This has nothing to do with my wife," Nash bit out. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the lantern light as Landon handed the assemblage of brass and glass down to Joker. "The woman in charge of the Howling Voice operation is a Knight- Class Gunner, and nasty even for one of those." 

Joker swore, with feeling. So did I, and Sasarai, who was coming through the hole, looked like he wanted to. 

"I don't get it," Aila said. 

"It means she's one of their elite," Joker explained. "Possible future head of the Howling Voice. The ones we've been fighting up until now have been Squire- and probably even Apprentice-Class Gunners—lower-ranked initiates." 

"So you're saying that she's worse trouble than them." 

"Much worse," I said dryly as Jacques jumped down— he was the last of us, and it was starting to get a bit crowded in there. 

"We should probably bring down part of the roof behind us," Ace added, "just to make sure we're not followed. Lead on, kid." 

Landon led—not in the direction where I'd noticed the prop, but the other way. The next few minutes were filled with muttered curses as people tripped over half-seen debris, and fragments of damaged Sindar carvings seen by lantern light. Sometimes doorways would appear to either side of us, but most of them were solidly filled with fallen stone blocks. Occasionally, too, the top of an arch would sprout out of the sides of the tunnel and curve up to the ceiling, or we'd find another wooden prop and have to squeeze around it. 

I called a halt just after passing through two of those arches. On the side we'd just come from was a long hallway, ending at a sharp corner with a prop in it. There was, I noted, a faint light visible as a reflection from somewhere on the other side of that corner, which meant that I wasn't doing this any too soon. 

"Cross your fingers," I said, and raised my hand to fling lightning at the point where the distant prop met the ceiling. 

The top part of the heavy length of wood came apart in splinters, and something groaned, but the ceiling didn't—quite— cave in. And I could hear the sound of distant running footsteps, and a woman's voice shouting something I couldn't quite make out. 

I forced myself to concentrate for a moment, and threw Hammer of Raijin at the far end of the hall, worried about the consequences, but with the feeling that I didn't really have a choice anymore. Stone tore and crumbled, dust sifted down . . . and then, with a roar, everything gave way and most of the long hallway crumpled in. 

We just got a light dusting—I'd picked exactly the right place to cast in, based on a vague memory of someone, somewhere, telling me that arches were very stable structures. The cave-in went right up to the first arch. 

"It'll take'em days to get through that," Ace said with satisfaction. 

I leaned back against a stone wall and closed my eye for a few, precious seconds. 

"I just hope that wasn't the only way out," Queen said. 

"Don't look at me," Landon replied. "I haven't exactly had the tour—someone pointed out this one tunnel to me, and told me there weren't any usable branches before I hit the exit." 

I sighed and opened my eye again. "If there isn't another way out already, we'll make one," I said, and jerked my chin in the direction of the still-open end of the tunnel, in the hope that everyone would take the hint and get moving again.


	7. Chapter 7

The next stretch of corridor was still winding, damaged, and no better lit, but we could afford to move a little more slowly now, so fewer people tripped. Still, I think we all breathed a sigh of relief when we saw light up ahead. 

A little while after we passed the first torches stuck into cracks in the wall, we reached the first intersection that offered a real choice of directions. Landon stopped in the middle of it and cupped his hands around his mouth. 

"Hellooo!" 

It echoed weirdly for a moment. Queen, who was beside me, shifted uneasily and said, "No guards?" 

I'd been wondering much the same thing, but . . . well, I'm no tracker, but we'd passed an alcove not all that long ago whose floor had been cleared of debris, and since then the passageway had mostly been clear, too. I was willing to bet that there had been a guard stationed in that alcove until recently. 

It looked like the rebel leader's capture meant no one was taking care of little things like guard rotations. _They're probably all running around like beheaded chickens trying to figure out what to do next—if this is a typical rebellion, most of 'em are around Aila's and Landon's ages and have no idea of how to organize anything._

Well, that wasn't my problem. 

Ace and Joker had started arguing in low voices by the time I heard footsteps coming along the left branch of corridor . . . but then, it never takes all that much to set those two off. Anyway, I turned to face the approaching person. Stocky . . . broad at the hips and shoulders . . . a woman? 

"Landon, what have you done this time?" Definitely a woman, with that voice. I wished the lighting were better, so that I'd be able to tell if she was Ace's type, and take appropriate precautions. Given that build, the problem wasn't _likely_ to arise, but . . . 

The kid . . . well, he squirmed. "Sorry, Sis. It's just . . . I couldn't leave them out there to be killed, could I?" 

The woman sighed. "These are those mercenaries you were travelling with, aren't they?" 

Landon shrugged. "Well, not him—" He pointed at Nash. "—but they seemed to know him, so . . ." 

"That's Nash," Ace explained helpfully. "He's a spy, and his business here has something to do with you guys, so you might want to be careful of him." 

I think Landon's sister rolled her eyes, although it was kind of hard to tell. "Wonderful. Do you guys have any more surprises for us?" 

"Time will tell," Ace said. "Speaking of time, are you free for dinner tonight?" 

"Not with you," came the quick reply. 

Joker grinned. "Struck out again, eh? Well, you can always join the rest of us old fogeys for a drink." 

"Who're you calling old?" 

"I think maybe we'd better find somewhere to sit down," Queen said. "Once they start on one of these conversations, the only way to stop them, short of knocking their heads together, is to distract them somehow." 

"And we'd like to talk to you," I added. 

She raised her eyebrows. "To me? I'm Hilde, by the way, since my brother seems to have forgotten the introductions. I think I know who all of you are." 

I shrugged. "You seem to be a bit more knowledgeable than your brother about what's been going on." 

"Oerat's a bit closer to the center of things than Haddarat, so I have more chances to hear stuff . . ." The remark trailed off as she glanced at Nash, who smiled and spread his hands in a "who, me?" gesture. 

"I expect Captain Geddoe wants to know about what's happened to your leader, and I already know that part," the blond said. 

Hilde gave him a suspicious glare. "You do?" 

That smile became downright meltingly sweet. "Oh, don't worry, I got it from a couple of the Forestwall garrison, not any of your people." 

"Do we have to stand here in the middle of the hallway and talk about this, Hilly?" Landon asked. 

His sister glared. "Don't call me that. _You_ can run down to the council room and tell them that we've got guests. I'm going to take them to the small sitting room." 

Which turned out to be somewhere in the direction she'd come from. 

"So what did happen to your leader?" Queen asked as we all fell into step behind our guide. 

"Why don't you ask your friend?" Hilde replied. 

"Nash?" 

"I'll do anything for a beautiful woman—even repeat rumours," the spy said with a smile. 

Queen rolled her eyes. "You know, I'm coming more and more to share Chris's opinion of you." 

Nash's smile turned . . . I guess the best word is "rueful". "I forgot you've been dealing with Ace all these years. Anyway, my understanding is that one of this guy's lieutenants sold him out to the garrison here in Oerat, and he's currently being held in the dungeons under the old palace. Probably. No one seems quite sure when he's going to be executed—not until they've managed to squeeze the last bit of information out of him, I guess." 

I grunted—that matched what little Kiraym had told us. 

"So you guys must be working on getting him out," Joker said. 

Hilde made a sound that sounded like a strangled laugh, but used the fact that we were approaching a door in the left wall to avoid really answering. "In here," she said, opening it. 

_Small sitting room,_ I remembered. _I'd hate to see the large one, then._

It was only half a room, really—one back corner had collapsed, leaving a triangular space—but it was still a good size, and the lack of any decent furnishings made it look all the larger. Well, okay, there were a half-dozen stools and a couple of rough benches that looked like the discards from some lower-class tavern, plus a couple of packing crates, a brazier with a teapot balanced precariously on top of it, and an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. Still, pretty sparse. 

Nash took the end of one of the benches, then frowned as Jacques sat down beside him, and then Joker at the far end. Ace and the girls took stools, while Sasarai sat down alone in the middle of the other bench. I decided to hold up the wall, and chose a spot that put the door on my good side. 

"I'd offer you something to drink, but all we've got here is tea, and you'd have to drink it from the pot," Hilde said. Getting a good look at her for the first time in slightly better lighting, I realized that she might actually have qualified as "handsome". Not pretty, though. "Pretty" implies something a bit fragile when you're talking about women, and Hilde was almost as broad-shouldered and deep-chested as her brother. 

"That's okay—tea doesn't really count as a drink, anyway," Joker said. 

Ace rolled his eyes. "Don't you ever think about anything but—" 

Fortunately, they were interrupted when the door opened again and several people filed in. The parade started with three goons carrying staves, who I decided had to be bodyguards. Each of them was eyeing the other two mistrustfully, which said something about conditions around here. _Great._

The next two weren't goons, though. First in was . . . well, he looked like a clerk, really—skinny, with ink stains on his hands and clothes. Then came . . . _You've got to be kidding me._ It was all I could do to keep from doing a double-take, because this guy looked like someone I _knew_ had been dead for eighty years. Well, okay, the clothes were wrong—Lord Elmendis ea Theroe would never have been caught dead wearing a tunic that displayed so much wear at the seams, much less _brown homespun_ trousers, but otherwise this guy was his twin. He was even wearing a dagger with the ea Theroe crest on it on his belt. 

"You come from the south," he stated. His voice, at least, didn't match that of the long-dead Elmendis, for which I was thankful. 

"Brilliant deduction," Joker said dryly. "Yeah, we spend most of our time in the Grasslands, Zexay, and Dunan. Why?" 

"The G-grasslands?" the clerk-type stuttered. "Th- then you know if the T-t-t-" He made a face. 

"Sorry," Hilde said . . . although she didn't sound like she was very. "Warin has trouble with T's when he's nervous. I think he's trying to ask about the True Lightning Rune and whether it really was in the Grasslands during the war two years ago." 

The clerkly type nodded emphatically. 

"Why do you care?" Queen asked bluntly. 

"Because to us, the True Lightning Rune is what the Circle Rune is to Harmonia, or the Sun Rune to Falena," the ea Theroe explained. "It was the nearest thing that the Principality of Iddaran had to a sceptre." 

"Does that mean that whoever has the True Lightning Rune is your next Prince?" Ace asked with a grin. 

"Th-that was th-the old law," Warin said. 

"Although naturally, we intend to have it migrate to someone . . . suitable . . . as soon as we find it," the ea Theroe added. 

Joker snorted. "I'll just bet. To answer your question, there were rumours during the war of six different True Runes being in the Grasslands, but the only one any of us saw in action was the True Fire Rune." 

"There were an awful lot of other powerful runes being waved around, though," Nash added. "I expect someone who didn't know all that much about runes saw someone using a Thunder Rune and mistook it for True Lightning. It might even have been Geddoe here that they spotted—he's pretty good at lightning magic." 

Somehow, I managed to keep the smile off my face when no one contradicted him. When had they put this conspiracy together, and who had started it, anyway? _Queen._ Just a guess, but this smacked of real planning, not Ace's silliness, and that usually meant the girls. And Queen was the one inclined to be protective of me, although she'd never admit it. _And if we're lucky, this might even work._

"Six." Hilde made a disgusted noise. "Well, that explains that. Ten years from now, people will probably be claiming that Hikusaak was there in person waving the Circle Rune around, too." 

Meanwhile, the ea Theroe was looking thoughtfully at me. "Geddoe. That's an Iddaran name." 

I shrugged. "Blame my parents." 

"A dismissive answer . . . and yet you look like one of us, and your clothes and armour are very much like the uniform of the old Iddaran army. In fact, there's a statue in one of the squares near the old palace that you could just about pose for, if not for that eyepatch." 

I shrugged again. I knew which statue he meant, and the resemblance wasn't nearly as close as he was making out. 

I did wish I'd had the sense to dump the armour before we'd hit Haddarat, though. 

"I expect you're one of the lucky ones, whose grandparents got out of here in time," the ea Theroe continued. "Or maybe your parents somehow escaped. It can't have been you, unless you got out when you were just a baby—you're too confident to have grown up here. I'd guess you were born into some community of expatriates, and trained by someone who in turn was trained by someone from the old army." 

I waited. I had a feeling I knew where this was going, and I didn't like it much, but I wasn't going to interrupt him—we might still be able to learn something, if not from what he said, then from how he said it. 

"I take it that no one has bothered to welcome you home yet. Well, then, let me be the first." A brief shadow of disappointment slithered across the ersatz nobleman's face when I didn't respond, but he continued his speechlet a beat later. "You belong here." 

Ace had a coughing fit. 

"You may find it odd for me to say that," the ea Theroe continued. "You're a soldier, after all, and the only soldiers here now—the only soldiers _permitted_ to be here—are Harmonian. That's why we need you." 

Ace's coughing fit ended abruptly. 

"Need me?" Oh, yeah, I'd been right about what he wanted. 

Hilde rolled her eyes. "What he's trying to say is that none of us are trained soldiers. We need a military advisor, and you're the first Iddarani we've found with the right kind of background." 

The room was very quiet now. My people seemed to be holding their breaths, and even Sasarai and Nash were staring at me speculatively . . . so when I spoke, it sounded awfully loud. 

"I 'belong here', do I? A century ago, I might have, but Iddaran isn't now what it was then. It's been part of Harmonia for too long. Even if you succeed in making it an independent country again, I'll just be a ghost of something that no longer exists and never can again." 

"And it really does take nerve to ask someone you attacked just a couple of weeks ago to join you," Ace added. "Who do you guys think you are, anyway?" 

Hilde rounded on the ea Theroe. "I told you we should have waited! Olor probably could have—" 

"Will you just shut up about your precious Olor!" the ersatz noble snarled back. "The Harmonians have him! That means that for all practical purposes, he's dead! You're never going to see him again unless they decide to give him a public execution!" 

"W-wait a m-moment," Warin stuttered. He turned to Ace. "W-we attacked you? W-what d-do you m-mean?" 

"I mean that, in Forestwall, a couple of guys with crossbows were shooting at me and the captain," Ace said. "Nash said they were some of yours." 

I frowned and glanced at Nash, wondering what kind of proof "Nash said" was, really. The blond spread his hands in a gesture that reminded me a bit of Ace and said, "That's what I _thought_ they were—they mentioned 'stirring up Harmonia' and having killed someone from the local garrison . . ." 

Hilde and the ea Theroe exchanged glances. 

"They can't have been ours, then," Hilde said. "None of the cells outside Oerat have any weapons, and we haven't actually killed anyone . . . yet. They must have been . . ." Then she stopped dead. 

"Must have been . . . who?" Joker prompted. 

"Why should we tell you that?" Hilde asked. "We don't owe you anything—in fact, I'd say it was the other way around." I was starting to get a sense of who the real leader here was, although they probably didn't realize it themselves. A woman, working-class, and young . . . if Hilde hadn't been built like an anvil, she would have been easy to overlook. 

"We rescued your brother when he was about to be eaten by Shadow Dogs," Aila snapped. 

I held up my hand. "Okay, so what do you want in exchange for telling us?" 

"Break Olor out of jail, and I'll tell you everything you want to know." 

"Who's Olor?" Ace asked. 

"He was in charge of this mess, until someone turned him in," Hilde explained grimly, and glared at Warin, then the ea Theroe. "The 'leader' we were talking about out in the hallway." 

"And why us?" Joker added. "A bunch of mercenaries working for Harmonia . . . and a spy? You sure you trust us that much?" 

"The problem is that we don't trust _each other_ ," the ea Theroe explained. "It was one of us who betrayed Olor to the Harmonians. We're all afraid that if _we_ try to get Olor out, the traitor is going to send someone along to make sure that all we get back is his corpse. You, on the other hand, have no particular reason to want him dead—having him where he is suits Harmonia's interests just as well." 

"So you'll either actually do the job, or refuse us outright, in which case we're no worse off," Hilde finished. 

"I think that's the most bizarre chain of reasoning I have ever heard," Sasarai said—nearly the first time he'd spoken since the Howling Voice had attacked us. 

"We need to talk this over," Ace said. "Alone." 

The three of them exchanged glances again. "I guess that's reasonable enough," Hilde said. "We'll give you a little time alone, then." 

I watched as they filed out—Hilde first, then Warin and the ea Theroe, and the trio of goons last. As soon as the door was shut behind them, Nash got up and pressed his ear against it to listen. He waited a few minutes, and then opened it and made a quick check of the hall. 

"Getting paranoid in your old age?" Joker asked as the blond closed the door again and returned to his seat. 

Nash shrugged. "It just struck me as something a couple of them would be dumb enough to try." 

"So what are we going to do?" Aila asked. "Do we help them?" 

"Question is, do we need their information that badly?" Ace said. "And what do we do if we refuse to help them? Oh, we can fight our way out of here—they wouldn't have brought those goons as bodyguards if they had anyone better— but after that?" 

"We'd be back where we started," Queen said. "Wandering around with the Howling Voice on our tail, and no way to find what we're looking for." 

"Speaking of the Howling Voice," I said, "I'd like to know more about this Knight Class Gunner Nash says is in charge of their operation here." 

The blond sighed. "I'll tell you what I know, but be warned it isn't much. Her name is Kalith, and she's about the same age as Aila here, which makes her one of the youngest Knight Classes in history." _More kids._ Was it just me, or did the people we fought seem to have gotten younger and younger over the course of my years as a mercenary? "She was chosen by the gun named Stone Crow, which is an odd piece of work—short barrel, only really accurate at close range, but fires really heavy bullets that go straight through most armour." 

"So what makes her any nastier than the rest of that lot?" Joker asked. 

"Um . . . you heard about that business in Muse last year? The general who got killed?" 

Everyone confirmed that—hell, it would be strange if we _hadn't_ heard about it, given what the circumstances had been. It hadn't just been that one general who died— someone had taken out an entire encampment with spells and explosives. 

"Well . . . that was her. _Just_ her. All of it. Her first mission after passing the exams for Knight Class." 

_Shit._ "And since then?" I asked. 

Nash shrugged. "I don't know. Master Sauro died not long after that, and without him there's no way for me to get information out of the Guild." 

Ace grimaced. "That isn't nearly as much as we'd _like_ to know, you know." 

"I can't conjure data out of nothing," Nash said, with another shrug. 

"So we scout her out," Aila said. 

Joker shook his head. " _Bad_ idea. Even low- level Howling Voice types have eyes in the backs of their heads, and if this one doesn't know what all of us look like already, I'll give up drinking." 

"So maybe we _should_ break this rebel leader out of jail—then maybe they'll agree to watch her _for_ us." Aila was all but squirming. She was probably annoyed that we were in the middle of a city and not out in the Grasslands, where she could just about sneak up close enough to a rabbit to catch it with her bare hands. 

"She'd probably kill them, too," Nash said. 

Queen cocked her head. "It isn't like you to be so defeatist." 

"You've never seen a Knight Class in action," Nash said. "I have." 

"Still, aren't you exaggerating just a bit?" Aila asked. "I mean, there's eight of us and only one of her. Our chances of killing her in a fair fight have got to be better than zero." 

Ace snorted, and almost—almost—smiled. "You never learn, do you? Never, ever try to draw your opponent into a 'fair' fight if you can bias things in your favour. That's the only way you'll last long enough in this business to get as old as the old man here. Poisoning her might be a better tactic." 

"We're getting sidetracked," Queen said. "This woman . . . she's an extra, an incidental nuisance. Taking her out isn't going to get us anywhere closer to our goal. To do that, we need local contacts." 

"And I guess that brings us right back around to helping the rebels," Ace said with a sigh. "Don't know how I'm going to explain _this_ one to Headquarters." 

"If you can't . . . well . . . we can go pirate hunting down in the Island Nations or something, and steer clear of Harmonia for a while," Joker said with a shrug. "The weather in Obel's supposed to be quite nice this time of year." 

"Sounds good to me," Jacques said quietly. 

"It can't be any worse than throwing in with the Fire Bringer during the war," Queen said, "and you managed to figure out a way to explain _that_ one away." 

Ace shook his head. "That was the captain, mostly. I just filled in the details." 

And that, apparently, was the signal for everyone to turn and look at me again. 

"You've been awfully quiet during all this," Queen said. "Well?" 

_Sasarai's been awfully quiet too. I wonder why? In fact, he's been all but mute lately._ Another little thing about him that didn't quite feel _right_ to me . . . I filed it away with the rest of my questions about him, hoping that my intuition really did have a reason for making me clutter up my mind with this stuff. 

"We're going to have to bust this Olor out of jail." I'd figured that out a while ago. 

"You've got a plan, then," Ace said. 

I shrugged. 

"Nash said he's in the dungeons under the old palace," Queen said thoughtfully. "And you mentioned some kind of secret passageway in that palace when we were talking at that inn outside Haddarat. Any connection between that and your plan?" 

I let one corner of my mouth turn up. "You think?" 

Ace threw up his hands. "You're impossible!" 

"That's what makes him fit in so well with the rest of you," Nash said. "So, are we done?" 

"Does this mean you're tagging along with us?" Joker asked. 

"Wouldn't miss it for the world. Besides, Kalith probably has me marked out by now—I _did_ kill a bunch of her people just a little while ago. Until we find some way of dealing with her . . . well, there's safety in numbers." 

Joker raised his eyebrows. "This from the man who once took on two Highland Generals at the same time?" 

Nash shrugged. "I'm not as young—or as well-armed— as I used to be." _In other words, he really doesn't have Grosser Fluss with him._

"By the way," Queen said, "I don't think we've introduced you to King yet." She gestured in Sasarai's direction. 

Nash took a long look at her, then an equally long one at Sasarai, and finished up by glancing at me. "King. Right. Whatever you say." 

"I'll go find our friends and tell them that we've agreed to give them a hand if they'll do the same for us," Ace said quickly. "And see if they can get our stuff from the inn, and maybe find us some food and something a little stronger to drink than . . . tea." 

That got unanimous approval, anyway.


	8. Chapter 8

One thing was for sure, the rebels would never be known for their cuisine. Lunch was three-day-old bread and sharp, slightly mouldy cheese . . . and, of course, tea. Okay, so I'd eaten worse, but that had been in cities that had been under siege for several weeks. Even trail food was better, and I suspected that if we didn't at least get our packs back I was going to have a mutiny on my hands pretty soon. 

Then we had logistics to worry about. I didn't want to spend any more time above ground than necessary, and Queen had been right when she'd mentioned cloaks, earlier. So, first Hilde and company had to be convinced to go shopping for eight of the long undyed-black-sheep-wool cloaks that were the ubiquitous fall-and-winter garment of most of the commoners here—and even though we were paying, they weren't happy about it—and then I had to try to figure out if this set of tunnels connected with the one I needed to get to. They weren't very happy talking about that, either, so in the end, I just assumed the answer was "no", borrowed a pen and a scrap of paper to make a sketch map that showed the three locations where I knew the section I needed had been accessible as of eighty years ago, and had Ace hand it off to Hilde in the hope that some of these idiots could figure out a way to get us somewhere close to one of them without being seen . . . and then ended up wondering whether everything I'd put on that map still existed and whether I'd given away my age by making it. 

_Or maybe they'll just assume that the mysterious mentor that the ea Theroe invented made me memorize the city layout as it was back then,_ I thought as I leaned against the wall, sort of watching Joker, Ace, and Jacques play cards with a battered deck Ace had extracted from somewhere. The two older men had used to fleece Jacques blind until he'd figured out they were cheating. Now he gave as good as he got. Aila was checking her arrows for damaged fletchings, and Sasarai had staked out a section of the floor and was moving slowly through a staff-fighting routine. I wasn't quite sure what Nash was doing- -he'd sat down in a corner with his back to the rest of us and was using his body and arms to keep anyone else from seeing what he was doing. Writing a letter to his wife, maybe. _Or to the Council of Bishops, to tell them that he's found Sasarai,_ the suspicious part of my mind added . . . but to be honest, I doubted it. And even if it was, it would be a while before he'd have a chance to mail it without the rest of us noticing. 

Queen had just finished a perfunctory check of her gear, and come over to sit on the floor beside me. 

"You're holding up really well through all this," she said quietly. 

"Oh?" It was all I could find to say. 

"Yeah. I keep on thinking of what it would be like if I went back to Sanady . . ." 

I shrugged. "There's nothing left of what this place used to be." 

She snorted. "Are you trying to tell me you don't recognize anything you've found here? I saw you do that double- take when that one guy, the one who never introduced himself, walked into the room. He looks like someone you knew, doesn't he?" 

"I didn't think I was that obvious," I said. 

"Oh, I doubt _they_ noticed, but I've known you for a while now. And Joker told me about that little act of yours with the bottle of brandy." 

I shrugged again. Some things don't need to be— shouldn't be—explained. Or at least, that's what I think. 

Landon came in a few minutes later, arms laden with so much wool that even a big kid like him could barely see over the pile. He dumped it, with a thud, on the bench that Aila hadn't taken over. 

"Hilly says to tell you they're working on the packs," he said. "Oh, and there was some change left over, so I bought this." He pulled a bottle of cheap apple brandy out of the front of his tunic. 

"Good kid," Ace said. His hand collided with Joker's when they both reached for it at the same time, and I swear I saw Landon smile when he bent to put it down on the floor between them. 

Aila, in the meanwhile, had apparently seen something interesting about the pile of cloaks, because she was rummaging through it. A few seconds later, she came up with a garment that definitely wasn't black-sheep-grey. "What's this?" 

"Oh. That's for the captain." Landon turned in my direction and explained, "Geron wanted you to have it. Belonged to his great-grandfather, or something." 

"Who?" Aila asked. 

"Geron ea Theroe—I thought you'd talked to him." 

"Guess that must have been the one who never introduced himself," Queen said. 

_Geron ea Theroe_ , I mused as Landon left. Not exactly an upper-class first name. His ancestors would have had fits. And what was he doing giving me gifts, anyway? . . . unless he considered such an old garment appropriate attire for a ghost. 

Aila shook it out. The dark burgundy wool looked almost black in the dim lamplight, but not quite the same shade of black as the cloaks looked like they were. "So what is it?" 

I took pity on her. "Army officer's greatcoat. Must be close to a hundred years old." 

"Hmmm." She tilted her head, and looked from it to me. "Doesn't really go with the rest." 

"That's because none of the rest of what the captain is wearing is the right colour," Sasarai said, grounding his staff. "His clothes should be the same as the coat, not black." 

Apparently Sasarai didn't consider it bad manners to talk about people as though they weren't there. I didn't really mind, but it was yet another thing that I found . . . curious . . . about him. 

Aila brought the greatcoat over to me, and I took it and held it up. It wasn't in bad shape, all things considered, although the leather bits had stiffened and darkened a bit with age. Someone had polished the brass fittings, though, so that they gleamed gold in the lamplight. The insignia were missing from the shoulder tabs, although small holes and green marks on the leather remained to show where they'd been. 

It was a bit of a waste, really—wearing it here would draw too much attention, and I didn't normally need such a heavy garment in the south. Well, maybe I'd find a use for it when I took up the wandering life again, as I'd have to do in a few years time, when SFDF headquarters finally noticed I wasn't getting any older—they already had to be convinced I was half elf. Maybe I'd even have it overdyed black to match the rest. 

I folded it slowly, respectfully, and went over to lay it on the bench beside the cloaks. If it really had belonged to Geron's grandfather, that grandfather hadn't been the ill-fated Lord Elmendis after all. Elmendis had been in the military only as a technicality, due to his position in Varen's Circle of Six, and would never have been caught dead wearing a _normal_ uniform. But his younger brother had been . . . a major? I remembered him only vaguely, but we'd met once or twice. He'd been killed at Black Mountain Fort, early in the Harmonian invasion. 

"You know," Ace said as I passed the (stalled) card game, "it's hard to imagine you as a soldier in anyone's regular army." 

I shrugged. "I never said I was a good one." And that was all the information he was going to get out of me on the subject. 

Our packs finally arrived a couple of hours later, carried by Landon and Hilde. Hilde also had my sketch map with her. 

"We think we can get you to _here_ ," she explained, pointing to a spot that was probably a couple of blocks from one of the ones I'd marked. "After that, you're going to have to go out in the open. You guys sure you know what you're doing?" 

Ace gave me a sidelong glance. "Actually, we're just kind of following along blindly . . . behind someone who's working from eighty-year-old information. That part of town changed much since Harmonia moved in?" 

"Yes and no, from what I understand," Hilde said. "It used to be where most of the nobles lived, but a lot of them were killed off during the war, and the rest have kind of fallen on hard times. The houses still in use have mostly been turned into businesses, or subdivided into apartments." In short, it was the other edge of the part of town that the inn with the snake was in— but of course, I was the only one who knew that. 

"There used to be a square with a fountain in the center right about where I made that mark," I said. "That still there?" 

Hilde shrugged. "Again, sort of, or so Geron said when he saw the map. The square's still there, but the fountain doesn't work anymore, and the statue at the center's been so badly messed up you can barely tell it was supposed to show a human being. That make a difference?" 

"Probably not." Not so long as there was enough left for me to get my bearings, anyway. 

"Anyway, it's going to be dark in a couple of hours," Hilde said. "Do you want to start then?" 

"Later than that," Joker said. "Midnight, maybe. No sense risking being spotted." Everyone else seemed to think that was reasonable enough, too. 

I spent the next few hours watching Queen lose chess games to Sasarai, who was very good . . . well, as far as I could tell, anyway. It isn't a game I'm wonderful at myself—Queen can beat me about three times in five. It needs too much effort and concentration that I'd rather spend on other things. Nash and Aila joined in the card game, where Ace fleeced everyone roundly until Joker figured out that he'd marked the deck and insisted that they switch to using _his_ cards . . . at which point _he_ proceeded to fleece everyone—except Nash, for some reason—but with Ace bearing the brunt of it. There really wasn't enough brandy in Landon's bottle to go round more than a couple of times, so Queen and I refused our portions and let Joker and Ace have most of it, knowing they'd both fight the better for it. 

Aila was about three thousand potch in the hole and Jacques, close to ten thousand, when Hilde showed up again. 

"It's time," was all she said. 

The pile of cloaks got pulled apart while she waited expectantly. We sorted through until we'd each found something that more or less fit. 

"Hope we don't have to fight while we're wearing these," Joker muttered. "They're a pain in the ass." 

Well, if you hadn't grown up with them, maybe they were. To my surprise, I found all my old reflexes for dealing with the things were still firmly in place. Nash and Sasarai didn't really seem to be bothered either . . . _When did Sasarai ever have to wear anything like this before?_

I had other things on my mind, though, as we followed Hilde's lantern through another twist of damaged corridors and out into the open air for the first time in hours. The moon was almost full, which was good because we'd be able to see things coming while we were out in the open . . . and not so good, because people would be able to see us if they cared to look. 

"Good luck," Hilde said, and started to duck back through the half-height door in the wall of a sunken garden that had provided our exit from the tunnels. 

I caught at her shoulder. "Leave the lantern." 

She made a face, but shoved the handle at me. I handed it off to Sasarai. 

"If we're not back by dawn, something's gone wrong," I added. 

Hilde nodded. "I'll tell them, when I manage to grope my way back." 

Ace pulled a stump of candle out of his pocket and held it out to her. "Here." 

"Thanks." It was hard to tell in that light, but I think she was surprised. 

"I hate to leave a damsel in distress," Ace said smugly. Nash looked a bit disgusted, but I wasn't sure whether it was because he hadn't thought of it himself, or because he thought Ace was scraping the bottom of the barrel. 

"So now what?" Joker asked. 

I ignored that, instead walking past him and the others and climbing the steps that led up to street level. The wrought iron gate at the top hadn't been oiled in decades, and it squealed loudly when I wrestled it open. I just hoped no one was around to hear. 

The buildings on this side street were, as Hilde had suggested, a bit on the battered side, but I could still see a half- effaced crest here and a bit of fancy ironwork there—enough for me to orient myself, anyway. 

"So are we where we need to be?" Queen asked from behind me. 

"Yeah. Pretty close, anyway." One block to a larger street, then another couple of blocks west, if my memory was still working right. 

Sasarai held the lantern so that our bodies shielded it as we walked along—not exactly optimal for lighting the cobblestones underfoot, but good for minimizing the amount of attention we drew. When we got to the edge of the square, though, I told the others to wait where they were, and went forward alone. 

The center of the square, partitioned off by a low wall, had once held benches and flower beds as well as the fountain. Now . . . well, some of the benches, being solid stone, were still in place, but I doubted anyone had planted a flower here in eighty years. The fountain's basin held a couple of inches of scummy rainwater, and the statue at the center had lost its arms, head, and the jug from which water had once spilled. I had to close my eye and picture it in my head to figure out which of the stumps that were left had belonged to the arm holding that jug, and which had been extended, pointing . . . yes, there. 

I went around to the opposite side of the basin, knelt down, and felt for the cracks that I knew were there. In the end, I had to take my left glove off to find them, then put it back on again to avoid making a mess of my fingers while pulling up the stone slab they defined. 

The opening under the lip of the fountain was a square black hole in a field of charcoal grey. I signaled the others over. I was going to need the lantern. 

Ace groaned the moment he saw it. "More tunnels? I don't get it—did I do something wrong in a past life, or something?" 

"Cheated on your wife, probably," Joker suggested. Aila just looked a bit strained. 

To actually get into the hole, I was going to have to crawl backwards under the lip of the fountain. I took my cloak off first, and handed it to Queen. 

There was an unpleasant moment when one corroded rung of the metal ladder inside broke off under my boot just as I was trusting my weight to it, but I didn't quite fall . . . and anyway, it turned out to be only about three feet from the bottom. Once I was sure I had stone under my boots again, I called for Sasarai to lower the lantern. I had to pull myself a couple of rungs back up the ladder to reach it when he did. 

It was a tiny room, really not much more than a closet full of pipes. There was a battered metal wheel set into one wall at about shoulder height. It was stiff as hell when I tried to turn it, and I had to jerk it hard several times before it would move. 

When I'd spun it clockwise as far as it would go, I crouched down and examined the wall underneath one section of piping. _Right. There._ Press and hold the roughened brick, and then stick two fingers into the crevice where a couple of the others didn't quite meet, and drag . . . My shoulders were already burning, but I eventually managed to get it open, all the while cursing the name of the man who'd decided to build such a ridiculously elaborate latching system into an entrance that only one person would find at all useful anyway. 

"Once you can't see me anymore, follow me down one at a time," I told Queen, who had knelt down to watch me over the edge of the hole. I hoped she wasn't going to hit her head getting out from under the fountain to turn around—all we needed was to have one of us wandering around with a concussion. 

Another low opening, another backwards crawl while feeling for a ladder. _Ace is right—when we're done here, I don't want to see another tunnel, or another Sindar ruin, for at least ten years._

By the time I'd dropped the last two feet down to a dimly-seen stone floor, Queen's boots were sticking through the hole that led back into the fountain maintenance area. 

"How far down is it?" she asked. 

"About five feet." I'd just found the pile of torches that I'd known had to be around there somewhere—by tripping over it, but you can't have everything. "There're some niches carved into the wall right below you." 

"Thanks. I gather this is part of your escape tunnel—a hidden door this complicated has to have been built on purpose." 

Lighting one of the torches meant wedging it in a crack in the tunnel floor so that I could have both hands to strike my flint against Geese's pommel, but I felt a lot better once I could see properly. 

"Almost makes you wonder if the Sindar enjoyed building mazes or something," Queen said, taking a quick glance in all three directions along the T-junction by which we stood. 

I shrugged. "They must've. I've seen something like a couple of dozen of their ruins over the years, and almost all of them have a lot more hallway than you'd need for the actual rooms." 

"They're a strange bunch," remarked Sasarai, as he dropped the last few feet to land beside us. Someone immediately shoved his staff through the opening, and Queen grabbed the end and helped guide it down while the ex-bishop got his bearings. Then she gave him a Look. 

"Wait a minute—they _are_?" 

Sasarai shrugged. "There are rumours to the effect that they set up a city somewhere remote and have been hiding out there ever since." 

I snorted with derision and handed him the torch. 

A few minutes later, Nash, Ace, Jacques, Aila, and Joker had joined us. By then, I'd managed to decipher the cryptic codes faintly chalked at the T-junction, and knew which way we needed to go. 

It really was a maze down there. Okay, so there were notes chalked at all the intersections, but I'd forgotten some of the codes, and anyway the information was more than eighty years out of date. Since then, there had been roof-falls, and water had gotten into a section of one of the tunnels and pooled so that it was knee-deep, leaving everyone with soaked socks. A couple of times I saw different coded notes in fresher chalk, as though someone had been exploring this area since Iddaran fell, but I couldn't make any sense out of them. I considered eventually getting us to where we needed to be enough of an accomplishment. 

The room was smaller than I'd remembered, or maybe that was just because the last time I'd been here, there had only been half as many people in it. It had three distinguishing features. Two of them were lying on the floor: a disarranged pile of torches . . . and a skeleton wearing fancy brass-washed armour and rags of burgundy cloth. 

"Guess this is the one who didn't make it," Ace said, bending forward over the bones. 

I caught his wrist to keep him from touching anything. "Leave him be. His last wish . . . he said that this was where he wanted to lie." 

"I take it he was a friend of yours," Joker said. 

"Sort of." I didn't want to talk about it, but that didn't mean the memories went away . . . 

Gerhardt ea Mondas and I had been about of an age, and gone into the army at about the same time, but there any resemblance ended. He'd inherited the light brown hair and blue eyes of his Harmonian mother; I was dark, like most of the population of Iddaran. He was well-educated, but not especially bright; I'd been barely able to read and write, but could think rings around him when I wanted to. He'd been from one of the oldest noble houses in Iddaran; as for me, well, one great-uncle who'd been first mate on a river barge had the highest social standing of anyone in my family. Maybe it was because we were so different that we'd become friends, I don't know, but at the time, I'd believed that that friendship had made my career. 

Gerhardt's family influence and my quick thinking had seen him promoted rapidly, and he'd pulled me up along with him. Corporal, sergeant, then the big jump to lieutenant—a rank that not many commoners ever made. By the time the newly anointed Prince Varen had chosen him for his Circle of Six, I'd been twenty-seven years old, and a captain . . . and had gotten dragged along to the capital with him. Nominally, I was his aide, but a more accurate description of my role would have been "advisor". A bit of a joke, really—the members of the Circle of Six were advisors to the Prince themselves, as well as bodyguards and military leaders. I never did find out how many of Varen's policies had been indirectly shaped by my advice. 

I shook my head to clear it, and backed slowly away from Gerhardt's body to approach the room's other distinctive feature: a solid slab of black marble set into one wall. White and green veins twisted through it in a way that appeared to be natural but at the same time obviously wasn't, because they formed a clear and symmetrical outline. 

"Once we're past this, we'll be into the palace proper," I warned everyone. "The room on the other side used to be the secondary wine cellar where they stored things like the guards' beer rations—I don't know what's there now, if anything. Nash, King, and the archers will stay there to guard our retreat while the rest of you come with me." 

"Thought we were a bit of a big group to move around quietly," Ace said to no one in particular. "Um, just in case . . . how do we get to the dungeon?" 

"Left outside the door, first left, second right, and down a flight of stairs," I said. "The guardroom's right at the bottom—used to be two people on duty there." 

Nobody seemed to have any more questions, so I stripped my right glove off and pressed my hand against the center of the marble slab. Sparks spat from the True Lightning Rune and ran along the veins in the stone, momentarily lighting up a larger duplicate image of the True Rune. Then there was a grinding noise, and the slab began to slide out of the way. 

I put my glove back on, drew Geese, and stepped through. 

It was still a wine cellar and not, say, an auxiliary guardroom, something for which I intended to thank the first appropriate god who occurred to me—Joker would probably know of one. A wine cellar not occupied by anything but bottles and barrels just now, for which I was also thankful: no need to silence anyone yet. Maybe we'd be lucky enough to get out of this without having to kill too many people. 

I beckoned to the others, who filed through the opening. Nash, who had the lantern, took the torch from Sasarai and threw it to the ground on the other side, where it guttered out. The archers hid themselves in the shadows of wine racks, choosing locations with good views of the entrance. Nash flattened himself against the wall on the latch side of the door. Sasarai didn't seem to know what to do with himself until Ace grabbed him by the arm and shoved him to a position opposite Nash, earning himself a murderous glare. 

Joker was the last person to come through from the tunnels. He grabbed my arm as he stepped through, raised his other hand to his throat, and made a cloak-unfastening gesture. I nodded—the lengths of dark grey fabric probably wouldn't be of any use as disguises in here, so there was no need to continue to wear them. Ace and Queen took theirs off as well, and left them, neatly folded, behind a pile of barrels. I did the same. Maybe the dim light and my taste in armour would make people think I was a ghost—I could hope, anyway. 

I took one last glance around the room, frowned, and made a gesture in Jacques' direction that finished up with my thumb pointing at the blond man with the lantern. _Obey Nash._ I didn't like doing it, but Jacques couldn't always control Aila, and I knew he wouldn't be able to stop Sasarai from doing whatever he damned well pleased. Nash . . . well, I thought he had a chance of getting them out if the worst happened, anyway. 

Then I walked over to the door, put my hand on the handle, and nodded to the blond spy to douse the lantern. 

The hallway outside turned out not to be all that wonderfully well lit either, with torches spaced far enough apart that their light formed individual little pools . . . but again, that was as much of an advantage for us as anything else, allowing us to glide from shadow to shadow. We made the first turn, then the second, and reached the head of the stairs without seeing anyone. 

I fished the Wind of Sleep scroll that I'd taken from my pack, earlier, out of my pocket, and handed it to Queen before we started down . . . very, very quietly, and with our backs pressed against the walls, because the door at the bottom was open. Peering carefully through the crack between the hinge-side edge of the door and its frame, I discovered that there were two guards on duty, conversing quietly and playing an illicit dice game. 

I nodded to Queen, and she brought the scroll up in front of her face. She was sufficiently talented at wind magic that just running the words through her mind was enough to activate the spell—any of the rest of us would have had to read it out loud, and risk drawing attention. 

_Thud._ One guard slumped slowly forward onto the table. The other, unfortunately, had been leaning back in his chair, but Joker leapt through the door and managed to stop him from falling over all the way, hitting his head, and waking up. 

The ring that held the keys to the individual cells was hung on a hook beside the far door. "You'd think they'd at least label the things," Queen muttered as she picked it up. 

I shrugged. There were actually only five or six keys— probably each one served for several cells. Not an onerous burden, anyway. 

To my surprise, most of the cells were empty. I'd been expecting more prisoners, but maybe the main holding pen was somewhere else now, like under one of the wall-towers. I'd have to ask someone about that, if I remembered. 

Hilde had given us a description of Olor. Hopefully, it had been good enough that we'd recognize him when we saw him . . . but as it turned out, it wasn't that hard. The first couple of cells we checked held, respectively, a woman who was sitting with her back to the door, and an old man who stared incuriously at us. 

There was only one other locked cell, and it held two people, both youngish men who might've matched Hilde's description once you washed away several days' worth of filth. There was only one way to tell which was which. 

"Olor! Hey!" Ace pitched his voice so that it hopefully wouldn't carry out to the guardroom and its sleeping inhabitants. 

"I'm Olor," said one of them. "Who are you?" 

"Hilde asked us to get you out," Ace explained while Queen started trying keys. 

The two looked at each other. "I suppose she couldn't come herself, delicate little thing that she is," said the one who wasn't Olor. 

"Delicate my ass," Joker said. "The last time I met a woman like that, she was a blacksmith herself, not just a smith's daughter." 

Both of them relaxed . . . but only slightly, and the other man was still hovering protectively over the one who'd said he was Olor. 

Ace snorted. "Give me a break—if we were here to kill you, there wouldn't be much you could do about it." 

Not-Olor looked like he wanted to argue, but Olor put a hand on his arm. "Danniken, he's right. They've all got runes— they could fry us right here on the spot if they wanted to, without opening the door. We're going to have to trust them." 

"Gee, thanks," Ace muttered as Queen finally found the right key. 

"Nothing personal," Olor added as he came to the door. He was limping—I hoped it didn't slow us down too much. "It's just that we're not sure exactly who turned me in." 

"And until we find out . . ." Danniken let the sentence trail off suggestively, stepping through the door behind Olor and slinging his boss's arm around his neck to help support him. 

Out here, with better light, it was clear that they were both in lousy shape, bruised and bloody. Olor had some burns just barely visible under his collar. Somebody'd been working them over, probably trying to get information. 

Joker shoved a vial of medicine into each of their hands. "Drink this, both of you—we don't have time for runes right now, and we can't afford to have you falling over." 

Danniken made a face at the taste of the stuff. Olor just gulped his down. I had a feeling that he was in worse shape than he was willing to admit. Well, he'd be able to rest when we got back into the tunnels. 

On the way back out of the cell block, Queen paused and threw the key ring into the girl's cell. It was as much as we could do—we were here for a reason, and couldn't put our escape on hold to chivvy people who apparently didn't care anymore into reaching for freedom, but given the keys, they had a chance to get out on their own. At the very least, having the keys _inside_ a locked cell was going to be a pain in the ass for the guards when they woke up. 

There were a couple of unpleasant moments during the trip back to the wine cellar, like the point at which Olor bumped against the still-sleeping guards' table and knocked the dice to the floor with a clatter, or the one when two servants, both griping about being forced out of bed at such a late hour, appeared out of a cross-corridor, and we had to fade back into the darkness between torches, but we somehow made it without being seen. 

"This is going altogether too smoothly," Queen whispered to me at one point, and I nodded back . . . but then, sometimes the universe does things like that to you just to make you suspicious. 

That was the last thing any of us said until Joker, opening the door of the wine cellar, nearly got skewered by Aila and said, "Getting just a little nervous, are we?" 

"Well, you were taking for _ev_ er," the girl retorted. 

Ace grinned as he swung the door shut again. "And you were just a little worried that we were going to try to leave you behind again, admit it." 

Aila snorted. "Not with four of us here standing in front of the exit, but being rearguard is boring . . . even if I know someone has to do it." 

"Some other time, you three," Queen said. "This isn't the place to be having a chat." 

"Exactly," Nash said. "I like a woman with a head on her shoulders." 

I hadn't broken up the conversation because Olor and Danniken were leaning against the wall and clearly needed a little while to rest, but enough was enough. I gave Ace a Look. He flinched theatrically, but started to herd everyone toward the opening that led back into the tunnels. 

The most difficult part turned out to be getting the lantern lit again, actually. _This really is going too well._ Once we were on the other side of the wall, I lit the stub of the torch from the lantern, wedged it into a convenient crack, and pointed at the tunnel to our left, not the one that we'd entered by. 

"Should be a small room down there where we can take a rest," I said. "I'll join you there in a minute." 

Ace blinked. "Right. Okay, everyone, you heard the captain." 

Meanwhile, Nash had persuaded Danniken that he was better off handing Olor over to someone else before he fell over himself, and the three of them were already limping in the direction I'd indicated in a group. The others followed, more slowly—Sasarai stopped for a moment in the mouth of the tunnel to look at me, with an expression on his face that I couldn't interpret. But a few moments later, they were all out of sight around a bend in the tunnel, leaving me . . . and Queen, who was leaning against the wall near the torch. I ignored her, pulled my glove off, and reached out to touch the edge of the secret entrance. There was a flash of light, and the stone slid back into place. 

"You really don't want them to know that you have that, do you?" Queen said quietly. 

I shrugged. "It might cause complications." As I turned away from the now-sealed opening, something about the angle caused the torchlight to flash off one of the less dusty portions of Gerhardt's breastplate, and for a moment the image of the True Lightning Rune etched itself on my eye in light again. 

"I doubt they'd be able to kill you for it, so what's the worst that could happen?" Queen asked. 

"Who knows?" I bent over to pick up the torch stub, then started to head in the direction of the tunnel down which the others had disappeared. 

She sighed as she fell in behind me. "All right, have it your way. I suppose if I had one of those damned things, I'd want to keep it quiet, too." 

The little room at the end of the other hallway was pretty much as I remembered it—half fallen in, with lots of stone blocks to provide seating. Olor was on the floor, though, and someone had wrapped him in a couple of the cloaks. Even so, he was shivering. 

Joker must have noticed me looking at the rebel leader, because he caught my eye and said, "Burns, and I think some of 'em are starting to get infected. I've done what I can, but we really need to get him to a healer." 

I nodded. 

Queen was a little less restrained. "Shit. Guess we'd better get moving again, then." 

"I'll help him," Sasarai offered unexpectedly, gesturing at Olor. I gave him a sidelong glance, but his expression was perfectly innocent. 

_And I don't really understand why I'm so suspicious of him, anyway,_ I admitted tiredly. A cryptic dream conversation and a handful of words and actions that might have been out of place for a man I'd never really known . . . it was all pretty thin. _I need a drink, or something._

So anyway, we limped slowly back through the tunnels. Joker and Ace ended up carrying Olor through the flooded section, although the rebel leader tried to insist he could walk. Personally, I doubted he could even stand without support anymore—he seemed to have used up most of his energy in the first part of our escape, and if he had any left, he was going to have to save it for the last climb up the ladder into the fountain square, which was going to be downright painful if he couldn't make it on his own. Briefly, I considered using one of the other exits, but, well, bumbling around in a section of town whose condition I wasn't sure about trying to find our way into another section of tunnels whose entrances we'd have to rely on Danniken to know about, at weird o'clock in the morning, with a light to make our location clear to anyone who cared, including the Howling Voice . . . it probably just wasn't a good idea. 

By the time we got to the first ladder, Olor was in too bad a shape to even bother to complain when I told Nash to boost him from behind and Jacques to go up and help haul him through from the top instead of having him try to climb. He just endured. 

"Are you all right?" Danniken called up the moment his boss's feet disappeared through the hole. 

"It's crowded," Jacques said. "He's going to try to go up," he added after a moment of quieter, muffled conversation. "Joker says it's quiet outside. Getting light, though." 

"No time to waste, then," Ace observed. 

I was the last up—had to be, since, again, I was the only one who knew how to close the damned overcomplicated secret entrance under the pipes. My shoulders were aching again by the time I managed to get that damned wheel back to its original position, and I swore under my breath all the way up the ladder. 

The last curse died on my lips as I reached the top and crawled out from under the fountain. Everyone had formed up in a sort of wedge shape with the hole and Olor at the centre— even Sasarai and Danniken had taken up defensive positions at the back. As I got to my feet, Queen and Ace, at the point of the wedge, each silently took a half-step to the side to let me through. 

Naturally, we weren't alone.


	9. Chapter 9

"Captain Geddoe. It's a pleasure to meet you at last." 

"Knight-Class Gunner Kalith." It didn't need to be a question. She couldn't be anyone else. 

She was short—maybe the height Aila had been when we'd first met her—dark, and, well, "buxom" about covers it, I guess. Not really what you'd expect a top assassin to look like, but the pistol that she was holding loosely in both hands, its muzzle pointed at the ground, was a short, thick, nasty number that matched the mental image I'd formed of the Stone Crow. 

"Joker." It had to be someone I could trust. 

"Captain?" 

"Get King, Olor, and Danniken out of here." 

"Right." 

Kalith tilted her head. "I'm surprised you're protecting him." 

"King, you mean?" Ace said. "We kind of owe him a couple." 

The assassin's eyebrows rose. " _Do_ you?" 

I could hear footsteps, some quick, others halting, coming from my blind side—Joker and the others, not nearly far enough away yet. _Just a few more moments . . ._

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ace was asking Kalith. 

"Are you trying to tell me that you haven't figured it out yet?" she asked, smiling. 

"You know, lady, you're really starting to get on my nerves," Aila said, her voice half-concealing the sound of her bow bending. 

"I'm sorry to hear that." Kalith actually put some effort into sounding sincere. Then Aila's bowstring twanged, and the assassin was . . . gone. Not invisible, or teleported—I'd seen a blur of movement, but I hadn't been able to follow it. Then there was a yelp from Aila, and we all spun 'round to see that Kalith had grabbed the Grasslander by the wrist. 

"Hey, now, that's playing dirty," Ace said with a glare. 

Kalith chuckled. "Don't tell me that you always try to fight fair, or tripe like that. Mercenaries aren't all that different from assassins when it comes to methods. Or motivations, for that matter." 

"Now _that_ certainly isn't true," Nash said. "A mercenary always has the option of telling his employer to get bent." 

The assassin sighed. "You were only an intern in the Guild—if you had ever reached even Apprentice Class, you would understand." 

"What, how to follow orders blindly?" Nash smiled. "Sorry, but I was never good at that." 

"I'll bet," Ace muttered. 

While they were babbling, I was thinking. Nash had been right—there was no way we could take Kalith in a physical fight. She was _fast_ . . . and using a ranged weapon, which never helps. None of us were going to be able to make an attack that would connect. 

That meant that magic was our best chance . . . but. She probably had a high magic resistance, which meant that low- powered spells would take too long, assuming we even had enough of them—in retrospect, I would have been better off sending Ace with Sasarai and the rebels, not Joker, but I hadn't known that at the time. High-powered spells . . . well, we had them— _I_ had them—but even with the True Rune, they took several seconds to cast. Was I willing to bet that my concentration would hold out against the worst she could do during that time? 

For that matter, what choice did I have? 

The first thing we needed to do was get Aila away from her, though. There're always too many possibilities for things getting messy when someone has a hostage, most of which end with both the hostage and the hostage-taker dead. On the other hand, Kalith's major advantage was her speed, which she'd lose if she continued to try to hold on to Aila—there's just no way that you can move another person, especially an unwilling one, as fast as just yourself. With that in mind, I drew Geese and lunged at her shoulder, knowing that I probably wouldn't make contact, but that it didn't much matter, either. Either she'd let go, or she'd try to use Aila as a shield, and the angle I'd chosen made that unlikely, I hoped. 

There was a blur and a sharp crack, and Aila was alone—kneeling pale-faced on the ground and cradling a visibly broken arm, but alone. 

"Keep her on the defensive!" One of the things I like about Queen is that she's pretty quick on the uptake. 

With Jacques kneeling beside Aila, shielding her with his body and plying her with medicine, Ace, Nash, and Queen sprang into action, chasing Kalith around, trying to keep her away from the injured girl and just generally never giving her a moment to rest. I jumped up into the scummy water in the basin of the fountain so that I could use the broken statue to provide some protection at my back and my blind side, took a deep breath, and began to cast Hammer of Raijin. 

"Oh no you don't!" 

I was lucky—when I heard her say that, I swayed left, away from the statue, and she'd apparently been expecting me to move _toward_ it and trust it to shield me, so the bullet whined past my ear instead of smashing into my forehead. It blew the statue's shoulder apart into chunks of rock, and shook the entire fountain. A ricocheting chip of stone slammed into the side of my face with enough force that I felt the cheekbone crack. But somehow, through all that, I managed, by the skin of my mind's teeth, to hold on to the spell I was casting. 

Of course, it didn't hurt that I knew we were probably dead if I had to start over. 

"Shit!" Ace was down on one knee, with a spreading red stain on his trousers. Hole in front, hole behind . . . it looked like the bullet that had hit him had gone right through the fleshy part of his thigh, lucky for him, or he might have ended up as one-legged as I was one-eyed. Queen hesitated, danced back away from Kalith, and raised her hand to cast Healing Wind. And Kalith, just for a split second, stopped moving as well, clearly trying to take proper aim at Nash, so that she could reduce her number of opponents by one. 

It was the opening I needed. I flung my spell, and prayed. 

Oh, she really was fast. She took that shot at Nash— not well-aimed, and it didn't actually hit anything but the weed- grown earth of an empty flowerbed, but she did manage to pull the trigger before she flung the Stone Crow away and then begin a frantic attempt to cast an earth spell—probably Vengeful Child, the spell-blocker. With the thunder dragons already streaming down from the sky, there was no way she could have completed it in time to save herself, though. 

Lightning crackled around her and her back arched, but what came from her lips was less a scream of pain than a shout of pure rage. And it wasn't enough to kill her, either. By the time I'd jumped down from the fountain, she'd pretty much recovered herself, and was crouched on the ground, glaring at us . . . but given that Queen's sword was now at her throat and Nash had her own gun aimed at her, that was about all she could do. 

When I positioned myself in front of her, she said something so unusually vile that I found myself taking notes . . . and after nearly a hundred years in the company of soldiers of various kinds, it takes a _lot_ to surprise or impress me in that department. Ace, who'd limped over to join the rest of us, replied with something less vile but probably more creative—also more improbable, in that it would have required all participants, including the goat, to be double-jointed. 

I sighed and used Geese's tip to tilt Kalith's chin up so that she was actually looking at me—I could have done the same with my fingers, I guess, but only if I didn't mind losing a few. "You've got until the count of ten to figure out a good reason why we shouldn't kill you," I said. Even I wasn't sure whether that was a bluff or not. 

"Then kill me," she said. 

Ace shook his head. "You know, if you say that, that means we're probably not going to do it. Call us perverse, but we don't like taking suggestions from an enemy." 

"Besides," Aila added from behind him, "if we just kill you, you won't have suffered nearly enough." Jacques must have gotten some medicine down her, because she was on her feet again, and her arm was straight. If she didn't want to break it again she was going to have to baby it for the next few days, though, and that was going to be a nuisance. 

The sun picked that moment to peek up above the horizon, and suddenly there was blood-red dawn-light everywhere. Jacques yawned, and tried to hide it behind his hand. Suddenly I was very aware that I'd been on my feet since shortly after dawn the previous day, and the place where the stone chip had hit me was throbbing and starting to swell. 

"We don't have time to fool around," Nash said. "We're not going to get any information out of her that she doesn't want to give—she's Howling Voice to the core. Either kill her or let her go." 

"Not in cold blood," Ace said slowly, and Queen shrugged agreement. "In a fight is one thing, but sticking knives in helpless people's backs just isn't what we do." 

"Funny, I wouldn't have expected you to be so squeamish." Kalith's eyes slid shut . . . and before I could wonder why, I was blinded by a flash grenade going off almost in my face. 

By the time my eye started to clear, Kalith was gone. 

"Shit," Ace remarked conversationally. "She really is good." 

Nash looked kind of tense, though. "Next time she turns up, she's going to be ready for us." 

"And we'll be ready for her," Queen replied. "All we have to do is back her into a confined space, and she'll lose most of her advantage." 

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm tired," Aila said. 

Ace grunted. "We need to see whether King and the old man made it back in one piece, too. Let's get going before someone falls over." 

Jacques took point—not something that he usually did, but I think he was, in his quiet way, angry that Aila had gotten so badly hurt. Ace and Nash were right behind him. Queen and I exchanged glances and fanned out to either side, putting Aila in the middle. 

"Look!" 

For a moment, I couldn't see why Ace was pointing at someone's back porch. Then I took another step forward, and the light shifted just a little, and I could see a hand, and a patch of sleeve in a particular shade of purple. 

Ace was already heading in that direction, babbling all the way. "Hey, old man, what are you doing under there? For some reason, we were actually worried abou—shit!" He took the last few steps forward at a run, and dropped to his knees before he was properly stopped. "Old man, are you alive? Hey! Wake up!" 

Danniken, when we pulled him out from under, was dead—someone had rammed a narrow blade into his eye. Joker had a lump on his head the size of my fist, but his pulse was steady. Olor was alive too, just. Both his legs were broken— nasty breaks, with bone showing through the skin—and that had apparently been more than his already battered body could take, because he'd passed out. 

There was no sign of Sasarai except a forlorn Karaya headband that had somehow gotten wrapped around Olor's wrist. 

Ace rolled Joker over onto his back and the latter immediately began to snore. That got a snort or a smile from just about everybody. 

"Guess the old bastard's too tough to pack it in just yet," Ace said with a grin. "Queen, you got any Healing Winds left?" 

"I've got something better," Nash said before she could answer, holding up his left hand to show a Flowing Rune. "Now . . ." He closed his eyes for a moment in concentration, and little blue rune-fireflies filled the air around him. 

I have to admit, getting hit with a casting of Kindness Rain was a real relief at that point. It took away not just the throbbing ache in my face, but all the other little strains and bruises I'd picked up during the night, although it couldn't do anything for the fact that I was dead tired. Everyone else seemed to feel pretty much the same way—I could see it in the way that Queen's shoulders sagged just a little and Ace's grin became that hair less strained. 

The effect on Olor and Joker was a little more impressive, though. We all waited a little impatiently as bones withdrew back through skin and that fist-sized lump shrank down to egg-sized, then to large-grape-sized, then disappeared. 

Olor was the first to wake up. When his eyes blinked open, he seemed surprised to see who was standing over him, though . . . or maybe just surprised to be waking up again anywhere at all. 

"You people—" he began, then interrupted himself. "Where's Danniken?" 

"He didn't make it," I said bluntly—if the rebel leader was going to faint again, better that he do it now and get it over with. 

Fortunately, his control was better than that. He just got that someone-punched-me-in-the-stomach look on his face for a moment, then he gritted his teeth and pulled himself together. 

"Mind telling us what happened?" Ace said. 

"I don't really know," Olor admitted. "Your man Joker was helping me along, and Danniken and your other man— King?—were behind us, when something hit me in the back of the legs and pitched us both forward. Then I got hit in the head. I passed out before I hit the ground." 

"And if you're hoping I got a chance to turn around— sorry, but no." Joker's eyes were finally open, although his pupils weren't the same size. "I got dragged down to my knees, and then something hit _me_ in the head, too." He tried to sit up, and made it about halfway, to the point where he was braced on both elbows and looking like he wanted to lie down again. "What about . . . King?" 

"Missing," Ace said. 

"Shit." Joker did make it all the way up on his second try. "No telling who might have taken him, I guess—he's a popular guy." 

"Probably someone after the reward," Ace said thoughtfully. "Or at least, I can't see why someone from the garrison would have killed Danniken and stashed you two here instead of running you all in." 

"Reward?" Olor was looking from one of us to the next, narrow-eyed. 

Ace's curse was muffled by the hand he'd suddenly placed over his mouth. "Oops, didn't mean to say that." 

In front of an outsider, he meant . . . but the cat was out of the bag now, so I sighed and gave in. "King isn't his real name, and there're some people in Crystal Valley that want to get ahold of him badly enough to offer a reward for his capture." 

Olor blinked, and seemed to think about it for a moment. "I'll be damned—that was Sasarai, the renegade bishop. I _knew_ he looked familiar. But why was he with you?" 

Ace shrugged. "We kind of tripped over him in Caleria, and we owed him a couple left over from the Grasslands War, so . . ." He waved his hands expressively. 

"Anyway, this isn't the place to be talking about it," Queen said. "If you two can walk, we'd better get moving. We can rest once we're under cover." 

"If we make it that far," Ace muttered. 

Fortunately, nothing more went wrong between there and the overgrown garden where the tunnel entrance was hidden. And the only thing that went wrong after we opened the door was that Queen, who was the first to duck inside, almost tripped over Landon, who'd fallen asleep with his head pillowed on his arm and a guttering lantern beside him. 

"Oh, you're back," the kid said, blinking, after Queen toed him rather ungently in the ribs. "Did you find him?" And then, after he'd gotten out of the way and some of the rest of us had walked in, "Where's King?" 

"We don't know, and yeah, we found Olor," Ace said. "If you're hoping for more than that, you're going to have to wait about eight hours—I might have enough energy to get as far as my bedroll before passing out, but not if I have to run my mouth at the same time." 

Joker snorted. "Who're you, and what did you do with Ace?" 

"Very funny," Ace said. "Kid, give us a hand here— we've got wounded." 

I don't really remember much about the trip back to the inhabited areas of the tunnel complex, probably because I'd done so much plodding through ruined Sindar hallways that day already. When we hit the section with the torches, Hilde and a couple of others showed up and took Olor away. The rest of us just kind of stumbled onward until we hit the so-called small sitting room, grabbed the blankets we kept with our packs, and passed out on the floor.


	10. Chapter 10

Ace's guess of eight hours turned out to be about right—I could tell by the size of the bruise the bent plates in my armour had left behind when I woke up. I was going to have to do something about that before I went anywhere. Other than that, I felt a lot better, though. 

Joker and Aila were still curled up where they'd fallen, which made sense—they'd gotten hurt worse than the rest of us. Ace had a sheaf of papers by his knee, and was scribbling on the top sheet and muttering to himself. Queen was bent over a problem she'd set up on her little portable chessboard, Jacques was oiling the workings of his crossbow, and Nash was once more sitting with his back to everyone and doing who knew what. 

"Hilde came by a little while ago, and brought their healer," Queen said quietly when I sat up. "Olor . . . well, it's bad. Apparently those burns were really filthy. He's going to lose his left leg below the knee for sure, assuming he lives." 

"And the old man apparently has a concussion," Ace added, looking up from his papers. "That healer of theirs was hopping mad when he found out we'd let a man in that shape fall asleep. I told him Joker was too stubborn not to wake up, but for some reason, he didn't believe me." 

"Any sign of Sasarai?" I asked, not bothering to maintain the "King" story anymore. 

"She did say that the garrison had picked up a couple of new prisoners sometime during the night, and was keeping them under tight wraps," Nash said, not bothering to look up. "That could be our boy . . . or something completely unrelated. Except . . ." 

"Well, go on," Ace prompted. 

"You do realize that what happened to Olor and Joker is consistent with 'King' having been the one who attacked them." 

"We weren't born yesterday, you know," Queen said dryly. "It's just that it doesn't make any sense—why would he have attacked people who are supposed to be on his side?" 

"I don't know," Nash admitted. 

"Well, that's a lot of help." Queen rolled her eyes. 

"Maybe we spooked him somehow," Ace suggested. "It's probably been a long time since he last didn't have troops, or at least that man Dios, to back him up. I mean, why should he trust us? He knows we have our own reasons for doing . . . what we're doing." 

"Killing someone is a bit extreme for just being spooked," Queen said. 

"Hmmm." If Nash was right, that meant that there was a lot more wrong with Sasarai than I had realized—I'd thought his behaviour was odd, but he hadn't seemed irrational. Or . . . could the True Earth Rune have been influencing him somehow? To do what, and why? I stared down at the back of my right hand. Damnit, this was frustrating! I knew I was missing something, some possibility that was right under my nose . . . 

I gave up on trying to chase the thought through my head and settled for working on unfastening my armour. Maybe the damned thing would sneak up on me while I was doing something else. 

Laying my coat across my knees, I worked the damaged part back and forth until I decided that at least three plates had been bent. I was going to have to take it apart and replace at least one of them, and that meant I was going to need . . . "Queen, see if you can get our hosts to find me a bottle of really cheap wine, will you?" 

"You must be tired if that's all you need to get drunk," Nash said. 

Ace rolled his eyes. "He isn't going to drink it, he's going to soak his armour in it. Part of it, anyway." 

It was Jacques who actually voiced the "Huh?" that Nash obviously couldn't quite bring himself to allow past his lips. I shook my head and went to work untwisting the wires that held the damaged strip of my coat to the others. 

"That's right," Ace said, glancing at Jacques, "you've never seen this before—heck, _I've_ only seen it once, and that was before you joined up. That stuff the captain wears isn't padded leather, it's these long strips of little metal plates that're wired together, then packed with some kind of sticky wadding and covered over with leather. Soaking the wadding in wine makes it stop sticking . . . just water doesn't work, but don't ask me why." 

Nash's eyebrows had gradually floated upwards over the course of this explanation. "Must be pretty heavy," was all he said, though. 

I shrugged. "I'm used to it." And the way the stuff was made let it flex almost as well as the padded leather it looked like it was—well, in one direction, anyway—while giving more protection than, say, chainmail. 

I had the damaged strip loose now, and was peeling off the leather to reveal the mass of brownish fiber underneath. I didn't realize that Nash had come over to watch until he crouched down and prodded the stuff with a finger. "Doesn't feel very sticky." 

"It only sticks to itself," I explained, and in the next moment, wondered why I was bothering. 

"It's an interesting design, actually," Nash said, sitting back on his heels. "Armour and padding both in one . . ." 

"And it's even rustproof, thanks to that fiber," Hilde said from the door. "First time I've ever seen the real thing." Queen was with her, and she had the requested bottle of wine under her arm. She gave it to me when I held out my hand. 

"Here," Joker said, and something rattled across the floor—a corkscrew. Where he'd gotten it from when he hadn't even sat up yet was one of those questions I try really hard not to ask. 

"Trust the human wine bottle to have one of those ready," Ace muttered. 

"Better a wine bottle than a—" Apparently, Joker was recovered. 

I tuned them out and opened the damned bottle, using the contents to soak a rag that I laid on top of the part of the armour strip that I wanted to work on . . . and then looked up to see that Hilde was still watching me. 

"Do you need anything else?" she asked, but I could tell it was just an attempt to cover for the other. 

"Is there any more where that came from?" Joker asked, gesturing at the bottle, now sitting on the floor beside my knee. 

Ace rolled his eyes. "Talk about one-track minds." 

"Like you'd object to getting a drink," came the reply. 

At that point, Aila's right hand rose out of her blankets and unerringly punched Ace in the stomach. "Don't you idiots know that some of us are still trying to sleep?" Other than that, she didn't move, and her eyes certainly didn't open. 

"And anyway, I don't think we should count on getting drunk any time soon," Queen said. "I have a funny feeling that as soon as the captain finishes with his armour, we're going out." 

"That's right, we should pay our buddy Kiraym a little visit, and ask him about renegade bishops," Ace said, still rubbing the spot where Aila had punched him. 

"I'll see if we can have a few bottles ready for you after you get back," Hilde said, suppressing a smile. "We do owe you, after all." 

Queen tilted her head. "How's Olor?" 

"No change," the other woman admitted, her smile fading. "We still don't know if . . ." She shook her head violently and turned toward the door. "I'll be back in an hour or so to show you to the exit. Landon finally made it to the guildhall a couple of hours ago, by the way. He said to thank you guys for the most exciting trip he'll probably ever have." 

Ace laughed. "Yeah, I'll bet. That kid . . ." 

It wasn't Hilde who showed up an hour later, though— one of the goons came instead. He didn't offer his name—didn't say much of anything at all, really, even when Ace remarked that he'd been hoping for a more attractive back to watch on our way out. He was efficient, though, I'll give him that—we were climbing out of what looked like it had once been the cellar of a now-vanished house within minutes. 

It was a little after noon when we arrived at the gatehouse, and my stomach decided to remind me that I hadn't eaten yet today. I ignored it. 

Ace was the one who walked up to the bored-looking guard on duty and said, "We're looking for Captain Kiraym Andquist." 

The guard looked us over, and you could just about see the connections slowly forming inside his head. _They're armed. They're not trying to hide it. They walked right up to the front gate. That means that they've been allowed to keep those weapons. And that means they're probably something official. Maybe I shouldn't give them too much of a hard time._

"Kid," he said, beckoning to the teenaged runner who was sitting under an overhang outside the little gatepost and giving us a suspicious look, "go find Captain Kiraym and tell him there's someone here to see him." 

Well, the kid ran. He was back a few moments later. 

"I'm supposed to take them up," he told the guard. 

The guard considered that for a moment, then waved us on through. 

We followed the kid through a smallish courtyard and up a couple of flights of stairs to a familiar room whose main distinguishing feature was the huge desk in the center. 

"Captain Geddoe, it's a pleasure to see you again." Kiraym was already on his feet. "What can I do for you today?" 

"We heard you took some prisoners last night," Ace said. "Mind telling us about them?" 

" _A_ prisoner," Kiraym corrected. "Sort of. I suppose it won't hurt to tell you. Last night, someone found a man dressed in what looked like the remains of a Regular Army officer's uniform face down in an alleyway not far from here. Naturally, this is where they brought him. When we managed to identify him, we found out that he's wanted for questioning back in Crystal Valley, so we're detaining him . . . politely. Not that he's likely to run away—he's in pretty rough shape." 

An officer—not part of the garrison here, wanted for questioning, being detained _politely_ , which meant that he was probably pretty senior . . . "This man . . . his name wouldn't happen to be Dios, would it?" 

"I take it you've seen the Wanted posters. Yes, it's Colonel Dios." 

"I'd like to talk to him," I said. 

A long hesitation, then, "I don't see what harm it could do. We were told to give him 'every courtesy', and I suppose that includes visitors. I'll warn you, though— _he_ isn't talking much. When he woke up, he asked for help for his commander, that renegade bishop. The commandant refused, of course, and since then, the colonel hasn't said much of anything at all." 

Ace snorted. "Sounds like he's still as loyal as ever." 

"You know him, then," Kiraym said. 

"We met during the war in the Grasslands," Joker replied. "Well, okay, Nash here knew him before that—I don't know exactly for how long." 

"I think the first time we met was when he was a cadet," Nash admitted. "He would have been about twelve." 

"You're kidding me," Ace said. 

"Not at all. Yeah, he must have been twelve—'fifty- nine was the last year that I spent any length of time in Crystal Valley." 

Kiraym was looking at Nash with his eyebrows raised, probably noting the blond hair and blue eyes . . . but if he drew any conclusions from that, he kept them to himself. Instead, he said, "The colonel is in a room on the top floor. I'll show you up." 

The top floor turned out to have been divided up into several smallish rooms which were mostly being used for records storage and the like, judging from what I could see through the doors. Predictably, we stopped outside the only closed one. 

"No guards?" Aila asked. 

"It wasn't considered necessary—there's no way he could leave the building without someone noticing," Kiraym replied. Then he knocked. "Colonel, you have visitors—may I let them in?" 

No answer. 

Kiraym kind of looked at us. "Um . . ." 

"Dios, it's Geddoe. I need to talk to you about Sasarai." That got me a vaguely scandalized look from Kiraym— probably because of the lack of titles. 

The doorknob turned, and the door opened slightly. The face that appeared in the opening was thin and haggard, but there was no way anyone could have mistaken that nose. 

"You're a long way from home, Captain." The voice was raspier than I remembered, too. 

"We've been getting that a lot," Ace said from over my shoulder. "So are you going to talk to us?" 

"Of course. You're the first people I've seen here who might actually be willing to _listen_ to me." The door opened wider, and Dios stepped back, revealing a smallish room containing an unmade bed and a single chair. All things considered, though, they didn't seem to have done all that badly by him. He was wearing a uniform that looked like it had been hastily modified with appropriate insignia, and there was a lap desk stocked with pens, paper, and ink lying on the bed beside a tumbled pile of books—most of them the kind of cheap adventure novels that Ace favoured. 

"Gonna be a tight fit," Ace observed as he followed me in. 

"I'll reserve the banquet hall next time," Dios said . . . which struck me as unlike him. _Guess he's been too close to the edge for a while._

We all managed to fit somehow, with Dios taking the chair and Jacques and Aila sitting down side-by-side on the bed. It was a good thing we weren't intending to fight in there, though- -we'd have ended up putting each other's eyes out, and I didn't have an eye to spare. 

Kiraym ended up blocking the doorway—by the time the rest of us were inside, it was the only place left for him to stand. 

Dios looked at him coolly. "Thank you, Captain, that will be all." 

Kiraym clearly wasn't happy about that, but he said "Yes, sir," anyway, gave a textbook salute that Dios didn't bother to return, spun on his heel, and stepped back out into the hallway, closing the door behind him. 

"I wish it hadn't been necessary for me to do that," the big-nosed officer said quietly. "He's a good man, that one . . . but that means that he'll report our conversation to his commander, and I suspect we may not want that." 

"I think you're selling him short," Queen said, "but okay. Anyway, how did you get here? Sasarai told us that you'd been injured and he'd dumped you somewhere further south." 

Dios froze. " _Sasarai_ told you? When?" 

"In Caleria, a few weeks ago," Joker said. 

"That's impossible," Dios said. "Sasarai and I have been sharing the same cell for months now. He could not have been in Caleria in the timeframe you suggest." 

"Are you telling us that the guy we've been travelling with was an impostor?" Ace said. 

"It'd explain why he hit me over the head and ran away this morning," Joker said dryly. 

"Where is Bishop Sasarai now?" I asked. Not here, obviously, so had he abandoned Dios in the street, or . . . ? 

Dios grimaced. "I wanted to bring him with me, but he was too weak—his condition has deteriorated badly since the True Earth Rune was stolen from him. He ordered me to leave and get help." 

A tiny dragon, bound and gagged . . . _I don't think the True Rune left him willingly._

"And who locked you two up in the first place?" Ace asked, saving me the trouble. 

"I don't know," Dios admitted. "The only time I saw the man who appeared to be in charge was when he came to take the True Earth Rune, and he was wearing a mask and a heavy robe." 

"You need at least one True Rune to steal another True Rune, right?" Queen said. "If you know which one he had, maybe that'll help identify him." 

"He had two, I think, but the only one I saw clearly was True Wind—he was carrying it around in a container. The other . . . all I can tell you was that he bore it on his forehead. I could see the light shining out from under his mask, but I didn't get a clear look at the rune itself." 

"Damn," Queen said. 

"Yeah," Ace agreed. "So all we know is that one of these guys has been in the Grasslands at some point in the last three years, and one of the others is either a near-perfect Sasarai lookalike, or another really good illusionist like Luc's girlfriend." 

Joker snorted. "That really narrows it down. Colonel, have you got any idea where you were being held?" 

"Somewhere in the city. Underground. I know that isn't much help, but I escaped in what turned out to be the middle of the night." 

"There're miles of tunnels down there," Ace said with disgust. 

"Why don't we let the colonel choose something to discuss that he actually does have information about, instead of peppering him with questions he can't answer?" Nash suggested. 

"I was intending to ask you to help me free Bishop Sasarai, but under the circumstances, that seems . . . redundant," Dios said quietly. 

"You were kidnapped?" Joker asked. 

Dios nodded. "From Crystal Valley itself. By the same people. I don't understand how . . ." His voice trailed off, and he shrugged in apparent frustration. 

So, we had a group of people with at least three True Runes in their possession hiding out in a bunch of Sindar ruins in a remote corner of Holy Harmonia, killing nobles and soldiers and kidnapping bishops and their chiefs-of-staff, and a Sasarai lookalike who had gotten a stolen True Rune from them before travelling the length of the country and back to meet a bunch of mercenary soldiers who just happened to have another True Rune . . . and a spy who seemed more than coincidentally interested in all those things. 

" . . . Nash," I said. 

The blonde raised his eyebrows. "Yes?" 

"Who did they tell you you were being hired to follow when you took the job?" I asked. "Sasarai . . . or Hikusaak?"


	11. Chapter 11

Everyone twisted 'round to stare at me, and I didn't blame them, because it wasn't a possibility that I seriously believed in myself, no matter _how_ well it fit the facts. It was the whole thing with the Wanted posters that was the fishiest. The _lowest_ level of authority that might have been able to order that was the Council of Bishops, and I didn't think they were stupid enough to have fallen for the lookalike's little game. The real Sasarai hadn't committed any crimes that I knew of, so the whole "dead or alive" thing didn't make sense . . . unless they were trying to hide something so big that smearing the reputation of one of their own was a minor detail by comparison. What little I understood about the process High Priest Hikusaak had used to create Luc and Sasarai suggested to me that he _should_ be Sasarai's perfect twin, or close to it. He had a True Rune—the legendary Circle Rune. And a power struggle between the founder and ruler of Harmonia and the Council struck me as something that the latter would really want to cover up. 

Older in appearance, a skilled staff-fighter, and lacking in manners . . . Hikusaak might easily have been all those things. The only catch I could see was the fact that a normal person can't bear two True Runes at once . . . but if there was a way to do it, Hikusaak might easily have known it even if no one else did, and besides, we'd never actually seen him _use_ the True Earth Rune. The High Priest had been out of the public eye so long that a lot of people believed he was dead, so he could probably have snuck out of Crystal Valley, or wherever he'd been hiding for the past century or two, without very many people finding out. 

_The scariest part about this idea is that the more I think about it, the more likely it seems,_ I thought with a half-smile. 

"They didn't give me a name," Nash said. "Just a picture. I figured out afterwards that it had to be Hikusaak that they were looking for—Sasarai never had hair that long, for one thing." 

I let out my breath, slowly. "Damn," I said. Everyone else looked either poleaxed or really, really grim—some of them both at once. "That really makes me wonder why he left me with the True Lightning Rune, when he's been trying for so long to get his hands on as many of the Twenty-Seven as possible." 

"No one even knows why he wants to collect them," Nash said quietly. "Especially when you consider that Harmonia is the only nation that has consistently held more than one True Rune. He doesn't need the others for protection, or for conquest . . . and he doesn't seem to be out to break the world the way Luc was. But why else would you need all the True Runes?" 

_Maybe he wants to break the world some other way._ All the True Runes gathered in front of what should have been Caleria's front gate, a bright flash of light, an empty landscape leached of colour . . . that damned dream I'd had in Forestwall was making more sense now. 

It really would be some kind of bizarre cosmic joke if it turned out that Luc had been sort of right after all. 

"What does the Circle Rune do, anyway?" Aila asked. "I mean, with most runes you can sort of guess what they're for from the name, right? But 'Circle' . . . what's so great about circles?" 

"The Circle Rune represents order," Dios explained. "Lord Sasarai told me once that it can turn people to stone, although how he knew . . ." He shrugged. 

Order. Yeah, it fit. 

"Boss? You've got the weirdest look on your face," Ace said. "Something wrong?" 

"You could say that." I leaned back against the wall— not that that was very hard, since I'd only been a couple of inches from it to start with. "I get the feeling that we may be fighting the Circle Rune. Directly. And that it needs the other True Runes for a reason that we humans aren't going to like very much." 

"Ouch," Queen said. "Well, I guess that means that we really are going to have to do something. Where do we start?" 

"Can't do anything until we find Hikusaak," Ace pointed out. 

"That could take a long time," Joker said. "All those little bits of tunnel with their own entrances and exits . . . I mean, it's not like I can scry for him in my beer tonight." 

"We need more manpower," I said evenly. "People who know the area. Let's go." I pushed myself away from the wall. 

"Go where?" Aila asked. 

"To talk to Olor." I figured everyone would be able to put it together from that. 

Queen stopped briefly in the doorway. "We'll do our best to get him out in one piece," she said to Dios, "but no promises." 

The big-nosed officer shrugged. "I didn't really expect any. Good luck." 

Jacques was the last one out. He shut the door quietly behind us. 

Kiraym was back in his office on the floor below. He gave us . . . kind of a wistful look, I guess, as we trooped past, but didn't say anything. 

When we exited the base of the tower, Ace was right in front of me, and Nash, right behind me. That meant that when Ace turned around and asked the blond spy, "So why are you still tagging along with us, anyway?" I couldn't possibly have missed the question. 

Nash spread his hands. "My orders were to observe Hikusaak—the man in the picture—and I can't watch him if I can't find him." 

"Yeah, but you might end up having to watch him to death," Joker pointed out. "Are you sure you're okay with that?" 

Nash shrugged. "My orders don't say that I have to protect him, or that I can't defend myself." 

"I thought you said a while ago that you aren't good at following orders blindly," Aila said. 

Ace snorted. "That isn't following 'em blindly, that's using them as a shield—right?" 

Nash nodded. 

"What surprises me more is that a former First Class Citizen is so casual about this," Queen said. "I thought you guys were brought up to think of Hikusaak as some kind of god." 

Nash opened his mouth . . . then looked at me thoughtfully, and closed it again. 

"I suppose I can't deny it the way I normally would," he said after a moment, "since one of you already knows my real name and some of my history. Some of the more conservative families do teach their kids to think of Hikusaak that way, but my parents were supporters of the People's Faction. That's why the priesthood had them killed. Even if I had been raised to think of Hikusaak as a little tin god, I don't think that perception would have persisted after seeing such slimy tactics being used on his behalf." 

"Huh." Queen gave him a long, thoughtful look. "Guess I'm going to have to revise my opinion of you. I always thought spies had to believe in what they were spying for." 

Nash gave her a quick grin. "I'm really just another employee—the same as you. But because of the way I look, it's hard to get non-Harmonians to hire me. And . . ." 

"And?" Ace prompted when Nash had been quiet a little too long. 

"Just because I think Harmonia has made a lot of mistakes doesn't mean I want to see it destroyed," the blond admitted. "But it does need to change. From that point of view, Hikusaak's death might even be a good thing. If we're lucky, it might act as a catalyst, and start . . . I don't know what, but something." 

Something, yeah. There was no way of telling, before it happened, whether the new Harmonia would be a force for good or a force for evil . . . but if nothing changed, it would just keep gobbling up countries whenever it became convenient, and enslaving the residents. And eventually, when Hikusaak had all the True Runes and Harmonia had gobbled up the world, everything would end in grey. 

I shook my head slightly. _So now I'm having delusions of being a hero and saving us all from the Coming of the World of Dharma. Somewhere in the afterlife, Luc's got to be laughing his ass off. And Wyatt's probably standing right beside him, doing the same._ Although the third member of our little unholy trinity, the original Flame Champion . . . he wouldn't have laughed. Although I had the feeling he wouldn't really have understood, either. Or would he? If it were him here right now, with someone handing him the opportunity to—just maybe—save the world without harming any innocent bystanders . . . That was the part that Luc had done wrong. Killing someone on the battlefield is one thing, as any mercenary will tell you. A soldier has made a choice to be where he is, to risk his life for something that he believes in—his country, his employer's cash, or maybe just three square meals a day and a place to sleep that's out of the rain, but something. But killing innocent people who aren't fighting back . . . I guess that's the closest thing I have to a definition of evil. 

"Boss? Hey, are you awake?" 

I shook my head, noticing for the first time that I'd fallen behind the rest of the group, and quickening my pace a bit. "Yeah. Just thinking, that's all." 

"Must have been some pretty heavy thoughts, if you let them distract you like that," Queen said as I came up even with her. 

I shrugged. "You could say that." 

"You need a drink," Joker said. 

"That's your answer to everything, isn't it?" Ace said. 

"It's better than being like you and having no answer at all," Joker snapped back. 

Ace glared at him. "Hey—" 

"We all need a drink," Queen said. "Shame there's no time for it right now." 

Aila kicked a pebble. It rolled away from us and tumbled into the gaping opening of the old cellar that was our access to the tunnels. 

Ace groaned. "Underground again? Damnit, I'm going to turn into a mole—or a dwarf." 

"If you were as well-endowed as they say dwarves are, you wouldn't have such trouble keeping a girlfriend," Joker said. 

"Actually, I think it's what's between his ears that's the problem, not what's between his legs," Queen said. 

"I always thought it was his mouth," Aila said thoughtfully. 

"What is this—unofficial Pick-On-Ace day?" 

"Maybe they figured that since you love complaining so much, they ought to give you something to complain about," said Hilde, from inside the cellar. 

That left poor Ace standing there with his mouth open as the rest of us filed past him and down the crumbling stairs. 

"I don't complain _that_ much, do I?" he said to the place where Joker had been standing. 

"Well—" Aila began. 

"Never mind!" Ace said, and hastily began to follow us down the stairs. 

Meanwhile, Nash was looking at Hilde admiringly. "You're almost as good with a put-down as my Missus. I think I'm in love." 

"Sorry, I don't date married men, spies, or First Class Citizens," Landon's sister said. 

"How's Olor?" Queen asked, changing the subject before Nash could think of a retort. 

Hilde winced. "The doctor said they really do have to take his leg. I came out here to meet you guys myself instead of sending someone because I just couldn't bear to watch." 

"Does he know you're in love with him?" 

Joker stopped in the act of ducking through into the opening at the back of the basement that led into the Sindar tunnels, and Aila said something rude as she just about ran into his back. Queen just waited patiently for her answer, arms folded. 

"I don't think so," Hilde told the wall. "And I'd rather keep it that way. I don't have anything to offer him—I mean, I've been disowned by my family, and I never finished out my apprenticeship. No money, no skills, no connections, not even much in the way of good looks—Olor deserves better." 

"If he loves you back, none of that matters," Queen said. "And if he doesn't, it wouldn't make any difference if you had a mountain of gold, enough skills to build and run an entire city all by yourself, and the entire Bishops' Council in your back pocket. If you want to make some kind of life together, you both have to care for each other for who you are." 

"And don't sell yourself short," Ace added unexpectedly. "You're smart, you're tough, and if you were ugly, I'd never have asked you out." 

Hilde looked like she was trying to figure out whether that was a compliment or an insult. 

" _Now_ I get why you never show anyone that novel you're writing," Aila said to Ace. "It's some kind of schmaltzy romance, isn't it? And you don't want us to find out." 

The expression on Ace's face was so odd that it made Joker burst out laughing. Aila managed to resist for a few moments before she started to snicker. 

"Hey, we're supposed to be _working_ here!" Ace waved his hands. 

"Right," Nash said. "We can talk as we walk." He was smiling, though. So were Queen and Jacques . . . and even I had to admit that the thought of Ace trying to write romance was damned funny. Or disturbing, if you knew what sort of thing Ace thought of as romantic. 

I waited until we were well into the tunnels to say, "We're going to need to talk to Olor . . . or to whoever's in charge right now, if he isn't up to it." 

"But talking to him directly would be better," Hilde finished. "Okay, we'll go ask. If they're finished with . . . the hard part . . . it might be okay—the doctor has a Water Rune, and he said Olor would probably be tired but lucid after he was done." 

We passed a guard, armed with one of the ubiquitous staves, standing in an alcove just before we reached the torchlit section of the tunnels. He hadn't been there when we'd left this morning. Either morale here was improving now that their leader was back, or Olor was better organized than his subordinates even when he was lying flat on his back in bed with infected burns. 

They'd put Olor in a room a little way away from most of the in-use part of the complex. There were two more goons in front of the door . . . although I could at least tell these two apart, because the older one was a woman, and the younger one, who couldn't have been more than Landon's age, was looking distinctly green. 

"Are they done?" Hilde addressed the question to the woman goon, who nodded. 

"He's supposed to be resting, but we're allowed to disturb him if it's urgent." 

"Hmm." Hilde looked at me. 

I raised my eyebrow. "I'd say that an opportunity to eliminate High Priest Hikusaak and get a Bishop in your debt was urgent." 

Her eyes went really wide—not an expression I ever would have expected to see on her. It looked odd. "I'd say so too." 

"Pulling out all the stops, aren't you?" Nash remarked as Hilde opened the door. 

I shrugged. I couldn't see that there was any point in hiding that information now. We needed to get these people moving on the search, and _fast_. 

Following Hilde inside, I found myself trying to decide whether or not Olor had better accommodations than Dios did right now. His room was certainly larger, big enough to hold us all comfortably. And there was more seating available, even if it mostly ran to crates, benches, and stools rather than chairs. On the other hand, the view was lousy and they'd had to put another of those braziers in the corner to keep the place reasonably warm. 

Hilde immediately plunked herself down on the stool beside the narrow bed, and took Olor's hand. "Are you okay?" she asked softly, carefully not looking at the irregular mound his one-and-a-half legs formed under the blankets. 

"Tired and sore," the rebel leader admitted with a smile that somehow managed not to appear forced. "My leg still hurts even though it isn't there anymore—isn't that strange? But the doctor says the rest of the infected areas are localized, although he's had to leave that one mess on my ribs open to drain. I should be able to start practicing with my crutches in a day or two. But let's talk about something else, like the reason Captain Geddoe wants to see me. Did I actually hear you say something about Hikusaak?" 

"I think the short version is, King, the guy we thought was Sasarai, is actually Hikusaak, and he's still somewhere in Oerat, hiding in the tunnels and intending to do something nasty involving the True Runes, and we need you guys' help to find him before he does it," Aila said. "Oh, and he's kidnapped the real Sasarai, who would probably be happy to be rescued." 

Olor blinked. "Um." 

"Hey, we know how it sounds," said Ace. "Craziest thing we've gotten mixed up in since the war down in the Grasslands. Things seem to go a little pear-shaped whenever one of the True Runes shows up." _Much less four of them._

"What I don't understand is why someone like Hikusaak would be travelling around with you—no offense," Olor said. 

"It's because he wants the True Runes," Ace explained. "He thought he could use us as—" 

"He wanted this," I interrupted, raising my right hand and calling upon the True Lightning Rune to reveal itself. I hadn't been intending to, originally, but I was getting tired of all this dancing around, and anyway, I suspected I would have had to reveal it sooner or later regardless of what I wanted. 

Olor and Hilde kept on staring at me long after the flare of light had vanished. 

"That's . . . Who _are_ you?" the rebel leader breathed at last. "You can't be Prince Varen—all the descriptions say that he was shorter—but . . ." 

"Varen ea Iddaran is buried in an unmarked grave outside Haddarat," I said. "I was one of the ones who escaped the palace with him eighty years ago when Harmonia rolled in. At the time, I was just a junior army officer, but for some reason, when Varen died, the True Lightning Rune came to me, even though I wasn't the one he would have chosen to give it to." 

"Then your sword . . . it really is Varen's Wild Geese, just like Landon said." Hilde's eyes were still wide. It wasn't an expression that suited her. 

I touched Geese's hilt lightly. "Varen gave her to Elmendis ea Theroe, the man he wanted to give the True Rune to. A couple of weeks later, Elmendis gave her to me . . . but only because the only other choice was to leave her for the bandits and the beasts." And they'd both charged me with the restoration of Iddaran . . . something that at first I'd been too tired and heartsick to even try to do. And after that . . . well. I'd learned in the Grasslands that you have to pay a price if you want to be free, and that price wasn't something I felt that I could force the children and grandchildren of those who had died for this land to pay. 

"We're yours to command, of course, your Highness," Olor said. 

"No," I said flatly. 

The rebel leader blinked. "'No', what?" 

"Not 'Your Highness'," I said. 

"What do you want a prince for, anyway?" Ace added. "Don't think you're able to run the place without one? If so, what were you planning to do before we came along?" 

Olor seemed about to say something, but then he stopped, and his eyes narrowed. "Hmm." As I'd been hoping, he wasn't stupid. 

"I'm asking for your help," I added, "not demanding it. We could search the city ourselves, but it would take a long time, and my knowledge of the place is eighty years out of date." 

"And like we said outside, it's in your best interests to help us anyway," Queen said. "If we do manage to rescue Sasarai, his endorsement might be enough to get you guys declared Second Class Citizens. It's a lot easier to stage an effective rebellion if you're allowed to travel and to bear arms, and don't have foreign garrisons stationed in all your major towns." 

"That sounds like the voice of experience," Hilde commented. 

Queen shrugged. "We didn't make it, so it's not worth discussing. I was just a stupid kid back then, anyway." 

"So are you going to help us?" Joker asked. 

"Of course," Olor said. "Hilde, pass the order to check around and report any sections of the ruin-tunnels being used by someone else . . . but don't mention the part about Captain Geddoe having the True Lightning Rune." 

"But—" 

"It isn't really any of our business," Olor said firmly. "He isn't going to be staying here, I expect, and it isn't our place to force him to become our ruler. We'll have to manage on our own. And if Hikusaak is looking for the True Runes, maybe it's for the best that there won't be one here." 

I couldn't force myself to meet his eyes anymore. Instead, I looked down and away. 

"Thanks," Queen said. "We appreciate it." 

Hilde, whose self-control had evidently returned, added, "By the way, we managed to find some bottles of this and that for you—we left them with your gear." 

It was Joker who said, "Thanks," this time. 

"You know," Ace told him, "the doctor said you weren't supposed to drink for the next couple of days." 

Joker scowled. "Like _hell_ —" 

"Take it outside, you two—there's a sick man in here," Hilde said, hiding a smile behind her hand. 

That was the last thing anyone said until we were out in the hallway with the door closed behind us. 

"So now we wait," Queen said. 

"And have a look at those bottles," Joker added. 

Actually, as we discovered, "bottles" wasn't quite the right word—they'd included a smallish keg of beer along with the assortment of wine, brandy, and other liquor. There was even some soda and a jug of orange juice—clearly, Hilde had been talking to Landon. None of it was of the best quality, but at that point, none of us really cared. 

So for most of the afternoon, we had a chess game going in one corner of the room, over a bottle of decent wine—or at least, Queen and Nash claimed it was decent. I'm no judge. Jacques, Aila, Joker, and Ace played cards in the middle of the room. At first, the older men won consistently, but as the hours wore on, they started losing to their sober opponents—less able to read the marks on the backs of the cards while plastered, I guess. And I seated myself on a stool in the back corner, to drink directly from the bottle that I'd chosen, and brood. 

"Your Highness." Yeah, right. I'd rather lose my other eye. Bearing the True Lightning Rune was a difficult enough responsibility to live up to—I didn't need to saddle myself with anything more. Especially when I'd never tried to run any organization that involved more people than I could get to know personally. And this lot didn't need me, anyway. If they had enough resources to win, they'd be able to do it under Olor's direction—he was clearly bright enough. And if they didn't, which I suspected was the case, nothing I could do would help them much. I wasn't a strategist. _Maybe I should advise them to hire Apple, if they can find her._

Of course, that completely ignored the question of whether or not what they were doing was a good idea in the first place—I still didn't think it was, but . . . 

"How much longer are you intending to stay up?" 

I hadn't noticed Queen coming over to sit beside me. She was just suddenly there. I hadn't noticed Joker and Ace passing out on the floor, either, but they were. Aila had curled up in her blankets, Jacques was fiddling with his crossbow again, and Nash, slightly flushed, was writing something . . . and occasionally drinking from a glass that otherwise stood, slightly tilted, next to his left foot. 

I shrugged an answer to her question. Damned if I knew how late it was, anyway—timekeeping in a windowless underground room is a pain in the ass. 

Meanwhile, Queen had picked up one of my empties and was turning it over in her hands. Then she sniffed the neck . . . and stiffened. "Brandy? Is that what you've been drinking all this time? It's a wonder you can still sit up! What are you trying to do—turn yourself into a potted plant?" 

"Make a lousy-looking one," I muttered. "Not very ornamental." 

She tilted her head and gave me a long, thoughtful look. "Oh, I don't know—you've got . . . possibilities." 

I snorted and took another drink. Well, she was looking a bit flushed herself—probably drunk, too. With any luck, neither of us would remember this in the morning. 

"You know, if someone from Sanady made me the offer that Olor made you, I'd probably have done something really stupid." 

I shrugged again. 

"I guess time and perspective really do make a difference." 

"You don't think I'm just a coward?" My mouth quirked upward at the corners as I said it. 

" _You?_ You're one of the least cowardly people I know." 

I glanced down at my right hand, currently wrapped around a bottle. "Am I really?" 

"In your own way. I guess some people wouldn't think so—but then, a lot of people seem to think that bravery means throwing yourself into things without worrying about the consequences. You're not like that. You think things through, find the best way . . . and then you go ahead and do it, without worrying about yourself. And you don't use the True Rune as a crutch, or an excuse . . . hell, you barely use it at all. Most people wouldn't be strong enough to do that. Absolute power, and all that garbage." 

"Flattery will get you nowhere." It sounded stupid even as I said it—I really had had too much to drink. _Speaking of which . . ._ But when I raised it to my lips and tilted it, my bottle was empty. Damned thing had betrayed me . . . but then, bottles always do. 

Queen chuckled. "Oh, don't worry, I gave up on that a long time ago. Don't want to mess up a perfectly good working relationship." 

_Huh? . . . Oh._ Okay, there always had been a certain amount of . . . chemistry, I guess . . . between the two of us, but Queen had never pressed the point, and I . . . well, maybe it would have been different if we'd met before True Lightning had chosen me . . . but there had been another girl back then, anyway, one who'd been killed when Harmonia rolled in. And since then . . . well. Been there, done that, in a number of variations, and Queen was right—it wasn't worth messing up what we had over, even without having to take the True Rune and its effect on me into consideration. 

" . . . You know, I've been wondering," she said after a moment of silence. "If we'd done something about the True Wind Rune after the end of the war, could we have stopped all this from happening? I mean, we all knew that Luc's death would sort have just left it lying around to be picked up by someone . . ." 

I shook my head, and then had to close my eye for a moment, 'cause the room didn't stop moving back and forth when my head did. "Don't see what we could have done other than one of us taking the damned thing, if it had agreed to cooperate . . . and even that wouldn't have done more than maybe delay things a little. I mean, it isn't as though True Wind is the only True Rune Hikusaak has . . ." I trailed off as I gradually came to the conclusion I wasn't making much sense. 

"You really should get to bed," Queen said with a wry smile. "If things start happening again tomorrow, we're going to need you at your best—or as close to as you can get with a hangover. Not that whatever they give us for breakfast probably won't kill all of us." 

"Try not to have nightmares about it," I said, and tried to stand up. I made it about halfway before I got dizzy and fell back onto the stool. On the second attempt, Queen's shoulder somehow ended up under my left hand, steadying me. She parked me with my shoulders against the wall for a moment so that she could get up, too. 

"Come on, 'your Highness'—your bedroll's over here." 

"Never going to live that down, am I?" I muttered. 

"We'll save it for when you're being more than usually high-handed," Queen said, with a wink. 

She wasn't really all that much steadier than I was, but we somehow managed to stagger together over to where my blankets were laid out on the floor. 

"Hope you're still used to sleeping in your armour," she said as I sat down on the floor. 

"I'll manage." Then I stopped, staring at my boots. They were swimming around, slightly out of focus, and I couldn't see where the laces were so that I could untie them. 

I'm not sure what Queen smothered with her hand—it _sounded_ like a giggle, but she's not the giggling type. Then again, she and Nash _had_ split three or four bottles of wine . . . "You really _are_ drunk, aren't you?" 

"Guess so," I replied with a shrug. 

"Okay, give me a moment." She bent down slowly, with exaggerated care, and snagged a blurry something that might have been the end of a bootlace—had to have been, really, because when she pulled it, I felt my boot loosen. Then she did the same for the other foot. "Good night, Captain," she said, straightening. 

"'Night," was the best I could manage in return, preoccupied with kicking my boots off. Then Queen left me alone to wonder why she'd bothered, thoughts chasing each other in fuzzy circles through my head until they were swallowed up by blackness.


	12. Chapter 12

I may have slept the sleep of the just, but I woke up with the hangover of the dissipated. _The wages of sin,_ as Gerhardt used to say when I was still his aide/advisor. He would have laughed as he said it, though. It had been enough to give you the impression that he'd never been really hung over . . . although given the amount of drinking he and Varen had always done together, I couldn't see how that was possible.

I sat up very slowly, cradling my head in my hands, and realized that I was the first one awake. Ace and Queen and the others were mostly visible as dark lumps on the floor in the dim light from the brazier . . . except for Nash, who'd somehow managed to fall asleep sitting up, with a couple of the cloaks wrapped around him. I would have been tempted to try to go back to sleep myself if my head hadn't felt like some blacksmith had been using it as an anvil. Instead, I started rummaging blind through my pack, looking for some of the disgusting herbal potion that shopkeepers the world over call _medicine_. Somehow, when I found it, I managed to get it down without gagging, and resumed my head-in-hands position while I waited for the headache to dissipate. 

Or at least that's what I meant to do, until a prickling feeling in the back of my neck made me turn and look over my shoulder, gritting my teeth against the sudden stab of pain. 

There was someone whose silhouette I didn't recognize standing behind me. 

I kicked my blankets out of the way and came to my feet, turning to face the stranger as I did so. Somehow, Geese had ended up in my hand, and I swung her in a short, sharp arc, sending her scabbard flying. It hit Ace, who woke with a "Hey! What do you think—ah, shit!" and began shaking each of the two nearest people—Joker and Jacques, as it happened. "Wake up, people, we've got company!" 

In the meanwhile, Geese had completed her motion, and was pointed at the throat of the strange, robed figure, which threw up its hands. 

"Please! I am not your enemy!" 

My eyebrow rose. _A woman?_

"Sure, and I bet you snuck in here in the middle of the night to give us all free feather pillows," Ace said. "Somebody light the damned lamp. In the meanwhile, you—whoever you are—don't move." 

Really, it only took a few seconds, but it was enough time for me to note that while my headache was going away, my feet were freezing—standing on a stone floor with just your socks on will do that to you. Still, I wasn't going to go look for my boots. 

Light flared as Jacques lit the lamp, and for the first time, I got a good look at our unexpected visitor. 

Female, yeah, with black hair down to her ankles, wearing some kind of weird white robes. At first, I thought her eyes were closed just because the sudden light had blinded her, but as seconds passed and she didn't open them, I started to wonder if she wasn't just plain blind. Geese's point rested lightly in the hollow at the base of her throat, and had pricked her just enough to draw blood. 

A blind woman . . . white robes . . . 

"Leknaat." It took me a moment to dredge the name out of the depths of my memory. It might have helped if I'd actually met her before, but I only knew _of_ her—the pet seeress of the Scarlet Moon Emperors and supposed holder of a True Rune, the Gate Rune. 

"You have heard of me, then," she said. 

"Wait a moment," Ace said. " _Leknaat?_ This is Luc's mentor? And here I thought she was just a pretty lady with no clothes sense." 

"Luc was . . . regrettable," Leknaat said. "He failed to learn the most important lesson that I tried to teach him." 

"Why are you here?" I asked, to get the conversation back on track. I kept Geese firmly where she was, though. 

"To warn you," Leknaat replied. 

"In the middle of the night?" Joker said. "This had better be good." 

"High Priest Hikusaak is your true enemy. He seeks to fundamentally unbalance the world. You must gather the 108 Stars of Destiny, and defeat him." 

My eye narrowed. "Wait a minute," I said slowly, partly to give myself time to think. "I don't need an army to deal with Hikusaak . . . and I think you know that, too. And none of us was born under the Tenkai Star." Although, admittedly, that hadn't been much of a problem for Hugo . . . but now I was remembering something an old friend had told me about this woman, long ago. "The Flame Champion told me once that _your_ power increases when someone gets the Hundred- and-Eight together, as he did. So it sounds to me like you're looking for an excuse to meddle." And I was damned if I was going to give her the chance, especially since she tended to disappear when you really needed her, and leave you to fight alone. During the First Fire Bringer War, she'd vanished shortly before I'd gotten involved. 

Leknaat looked . . . extremely nonplussed, although she recovered quickly. "I seek to end this without bloodshed. Hikusaak is a Tenkai Star, and while I have no love for him, his death would destabilize Harmonia. If all the Stars are gathered, I may be able to influence his actions." 

"You say that as though you think a stable Harmonia is a good thing," Queen put in dryly. 

"And it seems to me that this's already produced too many corpses for anybody to be able to end it 'without bloodshed'," Joker added with a snort. 

I studied our uninvited visitor for a moment, then said, "It's strange—everything I've heard about you implies that you aren't afraid of anything, but you're just about shivering out of your robes." Well, okay, that was maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but for just a split second, I'd seen an uncontrolled expression cross her face. "You don't believe we can handle Hikusaak. Or maybe you don't believe _anyone_ can handle Hikusaak—he must be just about the only True Rune bearer around who's older than you." 

"I—" 

I cut her off, deliberately, to keep her off-balance. "This isn't a war . . . yet. I intend to end it before it becomes one, not start one myself. So no, I won't gather the Stars of Destiny. If you want to make this quicker and less violent, then do something helpful, like telling us where Hikusaak is. Otherwise, go back to wherever you came from and let us get some sleep." 

"I do not know where he is," the seer admitted. "The Circle Rune is extremely powerful, and Hikusaak is deeply meshed with it. It clouds my vision." 

"Well, isn't that just great," Joker said with disgust. "Maybe I _should_ have tried to scry for him in my beer." 

Queen punched the cask. It sloshed. "There's probably still enough left for you to try, if you feel like it." 

Ace snorted. "Knowing him, all he'd see is suds." 

Joker frowned and glared, but what he said was, "I admit fortunetelling isn't one of my strong points, okay? If it was, I'd be making a cushy living somewhere down in Dunan, instead of rambling all over the countryside with _you_." 

Leknaat . . . well, with her eyes closed, she wasn't exactly staring, but she would have been if she could have, if you know what I mean. Ace must have picked up on it, because he looked at her and said, "Y'know, Lady Leknaat, you're gorgeous, but white doesn't really suit you. You ever considered getting another set of robes made in, say, a nice blue? And slit up the side. I'd bet you've got pretty nice legs, but you couldn't tell that from looking at you right now." 

And that finally did make the seeress's jaw drop, just before she disappeared with a soft popping sound. 

"I get the feeling you're not her type," Queen said to Ace, whose response was simply, "Damn." 

"Shut up," Aila muttered into her blankets as she tried to get comfortable again. 

As I lowered Geese to my side and started looking around for something to wipe her point off with, Nash stirred. 

"You do get the most interesting visitors, Captain," he said. "You know, I think you may be the first person in history to refuse to become a Hero and make it stick." 

I shrugged. "This isn't a situation that calls for a hero," I said. _Or a Hero._ "More like an assassin." I could have said several other things as well, about how all those historical Heroes, all the way back to Hikusaak himself, had all been kids—twenty-something at most—without any idea of how to judge a situation, but I didn't bother. Nash was a bright guy. He could figure it out if he wanted to. 

I didn't actually expect to get back to sleep, but I must've, because next thing I remember, I was dreaming again. 

I was standing in a wide hallway, walled, floored, and roofed in stone, lit by the sunlight that spilled through the open doors to either side, and by a faint, greenish glow that appeared here and there on the carven walls. Sindar carvings, but this wasn't a ruin. The stone was undamaged, the doors, while open, were certainly present, and the rooms on the other side were furnished in a style I had never seen before. 

I took a cautious step forward, then another. Touched one of the walls. It all felt real, but I knew it couldn't be. 

Footsteps. Two people coming up the hallway, talking as they went. I flattened myself against the wall in the shadow of an open door, and they didn't seem to see me, but I wasn't quite sure if that was because their attention was elsewhere or because I wasn't quite there, and I wasn't about to grab one of them by the sleeve to find out. 

" . . . a success!" the taller man was saying, although I wasn't sure how I could tell. Whatever they were speaking, it wasn't the trade language that was the native tongue of everyone I had ever met, but some other language that had to have gone extinct centuries ago. 

"I still don't think my rune is the best choice for this," the shorter one said. He was wearing a tan robe much like the other man's, but his was too long for him, and he was holding wads of it in both hands to keep it out of the way of his sandaled feet. And as he walked past me, I saw the True Lightning Rune glowing faintly on the back of his right hand. 

"What alternative do you suggest?" the taller man asked. "True Fire isn't . . . and . . . can't send south . . ." They were a fair distance past me now, and his voice was getting more and more muffled. 

_Why did you want to show me this?_ I wondered, glancing down at the back of my right hand—I'd decided that the whole thing was too elaborate and too pointless to be something I'd invented. 

My hand tickled as a tiny white-gold dragon pulled its foreparts up out of my flesh. It pointed firmly at the retreating backs of the two strangers.

Follow them. Right. Well, at least it wasn't difficult—the worst part was controlling my semi-instinctive need to duck behind things whenever one of them glanced over his shoulder. It was pretty clear that this was one of the True Rune's memories, so I was sure, now, that they wouldn't be able to see me, but . . . 

_Who are they? Sindar? They aren't what I would have expected . . ._ although I had to admit that I would have been hard put to say what I _would_ have expected. 

They stopped to unlock a door . . . or at least, I think that's what they were doing. For all I could tell, they might have been checking for flaws in its carven design by running their hands over it. When they got it open, I had to step forward quickly to keep from being shut out of the room on the other side. 

For a moment, I just couldn't make sense of the place- -too many glowing things and little fiddly bits that had to have some kind of purpose, but not one I understood—but eventually I managed to figure out which were on the walls and which were sort of hovering in midair without any visible support. The only parts of the room that weren't covered with glowing squiggles, other than the floor and the door, were a sort of stone plinth at the center of the room, and the top half of the wall directly opposite the door, which had been polished so smooth that the rest of the room was reflected in it. I couldn't see myself there, though, even when I walked right up to it and put my hand on it— more support for the theory that I wasn't really present. 

I tried not to look at any of the squiggles for too long— if I did, it was like they tried to wiggle around until they formed more modern writing, writing that I could read, and there was this pressure inside my head . . . I'd had Sindar writing try to do the same thing to me a few other times since the True Lightning Rune had picked me as its host, but usually I had to really concentrate on it before it started to wriggle. _Dreams are just more flexible, I guess . . . or maybe one of True Lightning's previous bearers having been here changes something._

Anyway, I focused on the two Sindar men, who were standing to either side of the plinth. 

"Just place your hand inside the circle," the taller one was saying. 

The short one tentatively raised his left hand. 

"The other hand, the one with the True Rune," the taller one corrected. 

"I guess I should be glad I don't have the Sun Rune or the Circle Rune . . . or the Gate Rune," the shorter one said, with a grimace. "Getting one of those into contact with this toy of yours would make me look even sillier than I normally do." Then he put his right hand firmly on top of the plinth, and I flinched away from the mirror-smooth wall as it lit up. 

What showed up there wasn't squiggles, though—more like patches of colour. I frowned, took a couple of steps back, and looked again. _A map of the world?_ Well, maybe. There were a few bits and pieces that didn't match up—forest where I knew there wasn't any, islands and bits of coastline missing from where I knew they should be and some others added on where they didn't exist, rivers not following quite the same courses—but it was recognizable. Decorating it were a few markings in bright pink . . . The first one I recognized was the symbol for the True Lightning Rune, located right about on top of Oerat. Then True Fire, just across the river. True Water, Earth, and Air . . . a stylized robed figure holding a scythe . . . a dragon's head . . . I stopped looking at the individual pictures and started counting instead. 

Twenty-seven scattered symbols, and I was willing to bet that the location of each on the map matched the actual location of the corresponding True Rune at the time these events had taken place in real life. 

Meanwhile, the two Sindar were studying the map. 

"Damn," the taller one said quietly. "See that?" He pointed to one of the symbols that I didn't recognize, one that looked like a cross between an arrow and a kid's scribble- drawing, located somewhere near Crystal Valley. 

The short man with the True Lightning Rune said something that I couldn't have repeated, but somehow knew to be a particularly vile curse. "He's on the move again." 

"Looks like it," the tall one said. "Are you going to call in the others?" 

A long hesitation, then, "I don't see what choice we have. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to pack up and move again. We have to find some way to stop him." 

The dream dissolved as the tall man started asking about alliances and tactical plans. Someone was shaking me. 

" . . . better be good . . ." I mumbled into a blanket, my mind still half-tangled in the dream. So there was—maybe—a device somewhere in the tunnel complex that could be used to show the locations of the True Runes. _That explains how Hikusaak found us, anyway._

"Sorry, Captain, but Olor's here," Aila said. "He says they think they've found Hikusaak's people." 

Not just Olor, I discovered as I sat up and rubbed sleep out of my eye, but Hilde, too. _Makes sense—I doubt he's all that steady on those crutches yet, and kids like that never sit down even when they know they should,_ I thought as I reached for my boots. 

"What is this, anyway?" Ace was awake too, and from the sound of things, not all that happy about it. "Never staying at this inn again—people in your rooms at all hours of the night—don't care if it's free . . ." 

"We brought breakfast as well as news," Hilde said. Now that she mentioned it, I could smell fresh bread and tea. For a moment, I thought my stomach was going to do a backflip and turn itself inside-out, but then it settled down again—the medicine still doing its work. "And what do you mean, 'all hours of the night'? Sunrise was three hours ago—we're more than halfway through the morning." 

"You weren't our only visitors," Queen explained. She had her eyes closed and was trying, blind, to break the seal on a medicine vial. "We'll be with you in a second, okay?" 

Fully dressed and with Geese at my hip, I felt a whole lot more like myself as I seated myself across the packing crate from Olor and helped myself to some tea—I wasn't sure I was up to tackling any of the fresh rolls in the basket that was sitting on the other crate yet, although Aila and Jacques seemed to be enjoying them. 

"So what happened last night?" Hilde asked. 

"A sorceress with a True Rune dropped in to talk to the Captain," Queen said. 

Olor blinked and his eyebrows shot straight up. "If this were coming from anyone else, I'd say they were joking, but . . ." He glanced at my right hand, which was currently gripping the handle of a chipped mug. "What did she want to talk to you about?" 

I shrugged. "A bunch of nonsense about destiny." 

"So you don't believe in fate," Hilde said with a little half-smile. "Somehow, I'm not surprised." 

"Well, you have to look at it from our point of view," Nash said, plunking himself down on a stool between Hilde and Aila. "Destiny implies an orderly—or at least an ordered— universe. Among the True Runes, it's Hikusaak's Circle Rune that represents order, so destiny has got to be on his side. Under those circumstances, I think we'd _all_ rather believe in chaos. Anyway, I thought you two had some news for us." 

Olor nodded. "There are a half-dozen sections of the tunnels that look like they're being used, according to the reports I've gotten back so far . . . but we've eliminated all of them—most of them are small pieces being used by kids who want to meet without their parents knowing." 

"That means it's a hidden entrance," Ace said, and added an improbable suggestion of something Hikusaak's parents might have done. 

Olor held up his hand. "I'm not finished. Two of my people haven't reported back yet—the ones who were supposed to investigate the area nearest the old palace—and they're a couple of hours overdue. I'm not really surprised—we knew that's where the people who attacked you in Forestwall were based—but . . ." 

Ace made a strangled noise. "I'm an idiot." 

"So tell us something we don't know," Joker said—but softly enough that Ace could ignore it. 

"I'd forgotten all about them," Ace continued, "but when you think about it, it makes sense, if Hikusaak'd had enough of travelling with us and was trying to get away." 

Queen was smiling. "All those doubled watches must have driven him nuts." 

"We never did get a chance to ask you much about those people from Forestwall," Nash remarked. 

"There's kind of been a lot of other stuff going on," Joker agreed. 

Hilde looked as though she'd just bitten into something sour. "Just as well, because I don't really know much more than I've already told you." 

"So you were stringing us along?" Ace said. 

"I guess you could put it that way." 

Nash smiled. "You're making me wish all over again that we weren't both already taken." 

_Both?_ Olor mouthed. Hilde looked away from him. 

"When did they start showing up?" I asked. 

"There've been some around for at least two years, but that was just one group, based here, that stayed about the same size," Olor said. "Then, a few months back, they started recruiting and expanding." 

Nash nodded. "The timing matches Hikusaak's movements. Guess they really are his." 

"So what do we do?" Aila asked. "Sneak back in there in the middle of the night?" 

I stared into my tea. I would have liked to wait another day or two, to confuse Hikusaak's people and hopefully lull them into dropping their guard, but Dios had said that Sasarai was weak and ill. If we wanted to get him out of there alive, every moment might count. _Damn, this is starting to get repetitive._

Joker seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he said, "When this is over, maybe we should quit the SFDF and start advertising ourselves as a rescue service." 

Ace snorted. "I'd be happier about that idea if it paid better." 

Unfortunately, I'd tipped my hand to Hikusaak while we'd been retrieving Olor. The entrance under the fountain square wasn't secret anymore, and it would be guarded. Hikusaak wasn't stupid. So if we wanted to sneak up on him, we were going to have to do something a little more elaborate this time. 

There were four ways in—five, if you counted whatever hole was leaking river water into the tunnels, but there was no way of telling if that was large enough for anyone to slip through. Anyway, as far as I could see, there was only one of the four that offered us much hope of getting in unseen. 

I looked at the rebel leader. "See if you can round up at least a dozen people who aren't afraid of fighting—twenty would be better." 

"I hope they're going to be a diversion, and not our backup," Queen said. 

"I'm also going to need someone to take a message," I added. "To a Harmonian officer at the gatehouse tower." 

Hilde grimaced. "I'll probably have to do that myself. The garrison . . . well, most of us prefer to stay away from them." 

"I'll get you some paper," Ace offered, already leaning over to reach for his pack. 

I scribbled down a quick note, waved it in the air to dry the ink, then folded it and wrote a name on the outside before handing it over to Hilde. 

"Do I have to wait for a reply?" she asked, wrinkling her nose as though the paper smelled bad. 

"Not for long," I said, leaning back in my chair. "It should be a simple yes or no." 

"Right." She still didn't look very happy about it, though. "All right, might as well get this over with." She pushed her chair back from the table. "I should be back in an hour or so." 

"Good luck!" Ace said to her retreating back. 

"I wish I could figure out who turned me over to the garrison," Olor said quietly after the door had closed behind her. "Hilde . . . For myself, I don't care, but I don't want her to be in danger." 

I looked down into my mug again. "She _was_ the one who turned you in, I think—with the best of intentions. She wanted to scare you into giving up the rebellion." 

I'd only figured it out last night, while I'd been lying there trying to get back to sleep after Leknaat's unexpected visit. Warin didn't have the spine to betray his leader, I was fairly sure, and while I might not like the ea Theroe, he seemed to be downright fanatical about the rebellion. If Danniken had been responsible, I doubted he'd have allowed himself to be jailed without chewing the ears off his captors . . . in Olor's hearing. That left Hilde. 

"Poor kid," Queen said. "Talk about having your plans backfire." 

Olor looked thoughtful. 

"I'll have to blame it on Danniken, I guess," he said after a long pause. "I don't like doing it, but if he were here, I know he'd be willing to render me one last service. And Hilde and I are going to have to talk. I never knew that she . . . that she felt . . . um, you did mean when you said both . . . I mean . . . Damn, I sound like Warin." _I'll be damned—he's blushing._

"You mean you're going to forgive her?" Aila said. 

Olor shrugged and seemed to make an effort to calm himself. "I don't think there's really anything to forgive. I knew there were risks when I joined the rebellion, and that this—" He gestured at what was left of his leg. "—was one of them. Overall, I think I got off pretty lightly." 

"Good for you," Queen said. 

Olor was still blushing just a bit. "Although I still find it hard to believe . . . Her? _Me?_ The scrawny little guy with one and a half legs?" 

"Doesn't make much sense sometimes, does it?" Ace asked, gazing morosely into his cup. "I've had more women leave me for scrawny little guys than you would believe. Don't know what they all see in men like you, but there's gotta be something." 

"The scrawny little ones are more likely to stay home and help you raise the kids, that's why," Queen drawled. 

Ace looked up. The expression on his face was a bit like the one Leknaat had been wearing after he'd given her his little bit of fashion advice. " _Kids?_ " 

"Why so surprised?" Joker asked. "You've probably got a dozen of 'em scattered all around the continent." 

"Careful—he might faint if you keep saying things like that," Aila said. 

Jacques, I noted, was covering his mouth with one hand. Probably didn't want Ace to see that he was laughing. 

"Seriously, though," Nash said to Olor, "that's quite a lady you've got there—strong, smart, and tough. If you've got any sense, you'll do your damndest to look after her." 

The rebel leader nodded. 

There was a long pause, during which the last of the bread disappeared. Then . . . 

"Captain Geddoe," Olor said seriously. 

I raised my eyebrow. 

"I've been meaning to ask you—what was Prince Varen like, really? You're probably the only person left who can answer that question now—you can guess what the stories that have been passed down about him are like." 

Oh, yeah, I could guess, all right. Nothing like a heroic last stand to blow things out of proportion—well, unless it's a heroic, _successful_ last stand, but Varen had never had a chance at that. 

"He was charming," I said quietly to the table. "Everyone loved him. He tried his best to be a good ruler . . . but his best wasn't really very good. He was a drunk, and not very bright." I could have gone further, and explained why a prince who was only a couple of years younger than I was had never married or produced any children, or that he'd chosen his Circle of Six less for their talents as advisors and bodyguards than for their ability in bed . . . but that had been so carefully hushed up while Varen was alive that I was pretty sure the only record left of it really was inside my head, and I didn't see any need to destroy the dead prince's reputation by bringing it up. 

Okay, so I'd liked the man too, despite his many faults. That isn't a crime. 

"A drunk," Olor said thoughtfully, then shrugged. "I guess it happens sometimes, when a position's inherited. Not everyone who gets stuck with it is . . . suitable." 

_Good,_ I thought. _You're learning._


	13. Chapter 13

The answer that Hilde brought back was a "yes", so an hour or so later, we were heading for the front gate of the palace-turned-Harmonian-military-headquarters. We would've been on our way a lot sooner, but Nash had insisted on running an errand first—retrieving a mysterious cloth-wrapped bundle from a rented locker in a storage shed near the docks. He'd stuffed it under his arm and refused to answer any questions about it. And anyway, the decoys had needed time to get into position at the other entrances. 

Kiraym met us at the gates of the old palace, looking tired and out-of-sorts. 

"So who tried to kill you last night?" Ace asked. I doubt even he would have thought that was funny if we hadn't all been more than a little keyed-up, though. 

The young captain grimaced. "Your friend Dios, by running me off my feet. I think he's a little . . . annoyed . . . that he can't go with you. I guess I don't really blame him—I don't know what in hell you're doing messing around down in those tunnels, but it _has_ to be more interesting than garrison duty . . ." 

"I'll send you a copy of the report, if they'll let me," Ace offered. 

"Please do. I could use some entertainment." 

Queen smiled. "If you think reading reports is entertaining, then you really _are_ hard up." 

_Clearly,_ I thought as Kiraym told the guards to let us through, _he was supposed to be one of the Stars of Destiny that I refused to recruit. I bet that if he'd been with us last night, he'd even have volunteered for it . . ._ but no, that wasn't fair to him. Kiraym wasn't stupid, and he was less naive than the rebels. I might have been able to make him understand . . . but I was just as glad not to have to try. 

Just beyond the gate was the old outer courtyard, now serving as a drill ground from the look of it. They'd done a good job of paving it over . . . but I had to admit that I kind of missed the trees that had once shadowed the walkway that was still visible as a band of fitted stone slabs among the cobbles. 

_Getting silly and sentimental in my old age,_ I thought, one corner of my mouth quirking upward, as I turned left toward the kitchen entrance. One thing you learn when you've lived as long as I have is that change is pretty much inevitable—it may make things better or worse, but it happens. If it didn't, we'd be living in the World of Dharma right now. All things considered, I'll take the changes over that. 

"Um . . . Captain Geddoe? Where are we going?" Kiraym was still following us. I hadn't realized that. 

"I think we're headed for the back door," Joker explained. 

"Back door?" 

Ace glanced at Kiraym, then at me. "Look, we'll be fine from here—you don't need to tag along." 

"I have to escort you while you're inside the fortress." 

Aila blinked. "Why?" 

"I think the commander's worried that you're going to steal the silverware from the officers' mess, or something," the young captain admitted with a grimace. "I kind of had to stick my neck out to convince him to let you in here at all." 

I paused halfway up the flight of three steps that led to the kitchen entrance, and turned to face him. "You're asking us for a lot of trust. Think you deserve it?" 

We stared at each other for what felt like quite a while—it might actually have been as much as a full minute. Then Kiraym raised his right hand and touched his forehead, lowered it to rest over his heart, and bowed. "I swear by the holy Circle Rune that I will not reveal anything that happens here today . . . so long as you don't steal any silverware." Straightening, he added, "Yes, I think I _do_ deserve your trust—have I done anything to violate it?" 

"Not yet," Nash said, looking grim . . . but I suspect that, like me, he trusted Kiraym's word, at least to a point. Anyway, I didn't intend to put the young captain into a position where he had to choose between violating the oath he'd just sworn to us and the one from his enlistment ceremony. 

"There's an entrance to the Sindar tunnel system under the city through one of the cellars here—one that's useless to anyone except me," I offered in partial explanation. "Your problem rebels are hiding out in the tunnels. We're on our way to free a prisoner of theirs." _Among other things._ I'd tangle with Hikusaak today if I had to, but if I could, I wanted to get Sasarai out of there alive first. 

"And you're probably going to spend most of your time standing in a hallway being bored stiff," Queen added. "Don't say we didn't warn you." 

"Believe me, it'll be better than sitting at that damned desk," Kiraym said. 

I'd figured I'd have an easier time finding the secondary wine cellar if I started from the side entrance rather than the main one—the Harmonian army had probably rearranged the main building more than a little since it had moved in, but there had been no reason for them to bother with the service areas. I did manage not to take any wrong turns, anyway, which wasn't bad when you considered I'd been inside the place exactly once in the past eighty years. 

"Here?" Kiraym's eyes narrowed as we stopped outside the door. "Are you _sure_ you're the only one who knows about this thing?" 

I shrugged. The young captain really was bright, or at least bright enough to put two—the location of the tunnel entrance—and two—the missing rebel leader—together to make four, but I wasn't going to say it if he wasn't. 

"It'll all be in that report," Ace told him with a grin. 

"I'll look forward to it," Kiraym said. "Let me guess— you want me to wait outside." 

"Sorry, but yeah," Queen said. 

"Nothing personal," Joker added. 

Nash just clenched his hand more tightly around the bottom part of his mysterious bundle, while Aila eyed the young captain sympathetically. Come to think of it, she probably knew all about being left behind by us—it was just that, unlike Kiraym, she'd always been too reckless and aggressive for us to be able to make it stick. 

Jacques entered last, closing the door behind him, then taking up a position to the left that would give him a decent field of fire through the secret entrance once it was open. Aila, although I couldn't see her, was probably in a similar position on the right, and the others all had the glowing fireflies of half- invoked spells swirling around them. 

I turned and raised my eyebrow. _Ready?_ The nods indicated that everyone was, so I faced the wall again, and raised my hand. Sparks crackled, and the wall slid aside. 

The room on the other side was empty of anything besides Gerhardt's bones. 

"I don't like this," Joker said. 

"It does look a little too easy. Again." Queen stuck her head through to check the walls to either side of the opening before stepping cautiously out into the buried room. "Even with the rebels attacking the other entrances, Hikusaak should have left someone here. He didn't strike me as careless." 

"Do you think maybe he _wants_ us to find Sasarai?" Aila said thoughtfully. 

"I can't how that would make sense," Ace said. 

"You've never wanted to have someone else take out your garbage for you?" Nash asked. "If Hikusaak has no further use for Sasarai, he may think it's to his advantage to have us take him off his hands." 

"Or he's hoping to make us careless so that he can hit us with something further in," Queen said. 

"Maybe not. Look at this." Joker was in a shadowy spot over by the far wall, and had bent down to look at something. A body, I discovered, as I got close enough to peer over his shoulder. Male, thirtyish, vaguely familiar, wearing leather armour with a hole in it— _one_ hole, right over the heart. He was lying partly on top of and partly beside a poleax. 

"Guess someone else got here first," Ace said. "Great. Now we get to play hide-and-seek with them, too." 

"Not 'someone'," Nash corrected. "He was shot by a gun, at fairly close range—see how the edges of the hole are blackened?" 

Ace groaned. "Not her again." 

"Higheast," Queen said. 

"Huh?" That was Ace and Joker in chorus, I think. 

"This guy was a gate guard there the last time we headed down that way. I thought he looked familiar. Guess he was a mercenary." 

The Howling Voice _and_ a bunch of other professionals _and_ Hikusaak . . . 

"This is getting ugly," Jacques said. 

There was a general nod of agreement . . . and, in my case, irritation. _So much for timesaving measures like splitting up. With Kalith around, we're going to have to search the place all together in a mob, and hope we see her before she sees us._ If we did run into her, we were going to need to get her gun away from her before she could get a shot off—in a confined space like a stone corridor, she wouldn't be able to dodge our attacks, but we were going to have the same problem with hers. 

"So how do we do this?" Queen asked. "Follow the right-hand wall?" 

Ace shrugged. "I guess, unless someone has a better idea." 

"You mean that thing where you put your right hand on the wall and keep it there while you walk, until you either find what you're looking for or end up back where you started?" Aila asked. "But that's so _slow_." 

"Yes, but it also takes you just about everywhere most of the time," Queen pointed out, ". . . and we can't afford to overlook anything. 'Cause if we do, that's where they're going to turn out to be holding Sasarai." 

"I just hope we find him before I turn into a mole," Ace said. 

"Which means that there's no time like the present to get started," Joker put in. 

For the next hour or so . . . well, let's just say that there's a lot of tunnel down there, and not many ways to tell which bits are being used until you come around the last couple of turns and see that a given area's lit up. There was also, as Ace pointed out repeatedly, a lot of water and slime and low areas that we all had to duck to get past and . . . I'm sure you get the picture. 

And then, when things finally got exciting again . . . well, let's just say that it was pure luck that we heard her before she heard us. She'd come to a place where there was water in the tunnel, and it takes work to wade quietly—work you don't normally put in when you think you're alone. When we heard the splashing, Jacques put the lantern down and he and Aila automatically went into stalking mode, with the rest of us tiptoeing along behind them. I also noticed out of the corner of my eye that Nash had loosened the cord that was tying his bundle shut. _Probably a weapon, then._

The archers oozed around a corner up ahead, and a split second later, we all heard the soft _thwang_ of shots being taken, and a sharp clink of metal against metal, followed by a muffled curse. 

"Stop right there!" Aila snapped. 

I stepped around the corner and was treated to the spectacle of Knight-Class Gunner Kalith, knee-deep in water and frozen in the act of bending over. 

"It's okay, Aila," Nash said from behind me. "If her gun landed in the water, she won't be able to use it again until it's dry and she's had a chance to clean it out and reload it." 

Aila grimaced. "Maybe, but I don't trust her." 

"I didn't expect to see you here," Kalith said, and instantly everyone's attention returned to her. "I hope you've figured out now that you're hunting big game, and not just some random bishop." 

"I wouldn't exactly call Sasarai a _random_ bishop," I said evenly. "Hikusaak had some very good reasons for involving him. But I admit I should have realized that _you_ wouldn't have been sent out if the stakes weren't very high indeed—higher than just another True Rune." 

Kalith smiled. "The information we had on you did say that you weren't a stupid man. Do you mind if I straighten up? I won't try anything. You were never my prey in the first place." 

"So if she wasn't hunting us, then why—" Aila began. 

"She was hunting Hikusaak," Nash said quietly. "The rest of us were just in the way. It all makes sense now." 

"You know, you've got a really nice smile," Ace added, making me wonder about his sanity—flirting with Howling Voice operatives doesn't usually do wonders for your lifespan. 

"Ignore him," Joker said instantly. "He's desperate." 

Kalith's face had taken on a rather peculiar expression. It stayed there for a moment, but then she gave up and burst out laughing. "If you people weren't mercenaries, you'd make a good comedy troupe," she managed to gasp out. Or at least, that's what I think she said—it was difficult to hear her when Ace was snapping, "Not nearly as desperate as you, old man!" near my ear. 

"I don't suppose you'd consider working with us, now that we've discovered we're all on the same side," Queen said, raising her voice slightly to be heard over Ace and Joker's exchange of insults. 

Kalith shook her head. "I think you already know the answer to that, judging from the way you phrased the question. Stay out of my way and I'll stay out of yours, though—I'll give you that much." 

"It'll do," Nash said. "I don't suppose you've seen Sasarai—the real Sasarai, not Hikusaak pretending to be him— while you've been wandering around down here?" 

Kalith shook her head. "Sorry. But then, I haven't really been looking." _Damn._

"We're going to retreat back around the corner," I said, after waiting a moment to see if anyone else had questions for her. "After that, you have five minutes' head start." 

Kalith dipped her head in what looked almost like a shallow bow. "Thank you, Captain." 

We backed up, and I started running a song I'd learned while serving as a marine in the Island Nations through my head—takes about a minute to get through one verse plus the chorus, so it makes for an easy way to tell time, but it isn't the sort of thing I'd sing out loud in mixed company even if I didn't have a voice like a crow that's dying of thirst. 

"I thought you said the Harmonian priesthood sent you to _watch_ Hikusaak," Queen said to Nash somewhere in the middle of the second verse. 

Nash shrugged. "I guess they've decided that he's too much of an embarrassment—or too dangerous—to be left alive." 

"That makes things a bit easier, doesn't it?" Aila said. "I mean, if we have to kill him, that means they'll let us off the hook." 

"I think we've gone past 'if'," Joker said. "If Hikusaak wants the True Runes, he's going to stay on the boss's tail until we get rid of him one way or another . . . and I don't know about you, but I don't think I'd feel safe leaving him alive behind us." 

"Damnit, I didn't sign up for this," Ace muttered, but not even Joker said anything about it. We all knew that Ace's complaints were really just for show . . . and if he wanted to bail out, he knew where the door was. Well, sort of, anyway. 

We wandered around down there for another couple of hours before we found what we were looking for—too much of what we were looking for, really. 

I started having a bad feeling about things the moment the area we were in started looking somehow familiar. Eventually, I clued in. _This . . . I dreamed this. This is where those two Sindar were. Which means that that True- Rune-detection-whatsis is somewhere nearby._ And wouldn't you know it, when we rounded the next corner, there was light ahead that wasn't being made by our lantern. 

I didn't have to order Joker to douse our light—he knew enough to do that on his own. Then we all stood around in the near-dark for what seemed like forever while we waited for our eyes to adjust. 

"Quietly from here, I take it," Ace muttered. "Do we split up and have someone scout ahead? Boss?" 

I didn't hesitate. "Queen. Nash. You're with me. The rest of you stay. If we're not back for a while . . ." 

"We'll do whatever we think is best," Ace said. 

One corner of my mouth turned up. "Exactly." I knew better than to expect anything else. 

Normally, I don't do my own scouting—Aila and Jacques are better trackers, and Ace and Joker are better at guessing their way through people situations, when they can be bothered. But here . . . well. I needed to know how much truth there had been in that dream, and the tiny bit I knew about Sindar ruins was probably more than anyone else in the group did anyway. I'd certainly visited enough of them. 

The light up ahead turned out not to be coming from anything as commonplace as a lantern or a torch, although it certainly flickered enough. It came from a strip of glyphs high on the wall, about as far up as the average man could reach. I suspected the cracks that crossed it here and there were responsible for the flickering. Still, even if it wasn't constant, it was adequate to show us that this section of hallway was empty. 

_Too easy,_ Queen mouthed, and Nash nodded. He glanced around quickly, then pointed at an alcove about ten feet further along and raised his eyebrows. I gestured for him to lead the way. 

The next few minutes were more of the same— stillness alternating with bouts of activity, all conducted in total silence. Nash was in the lead most of the time—trying to show us amateurs what a professional sneak was capable of, I guess. 

We found the cell first. It wasn't hard—the door was open and the damned thing stank. Evidently little things like sanitation for his prisoners hadn't been much on Hikusaak's mind lately. 

_Shit_ , Queen mouthed—a sentiment I could definitely agree with. Sasarai and Dios had clearly been kept here, judging from the faded army-uniform-blue rags mixed in with the straw on the floor, but just as clearly, the bishop had been moved since his subordinate had escaped. The question was, where had he been moved to, and how closely was he now being watched? 

Nash raised his eyebrows and pointed back over his shoulder. _Do we go back?_

I shook my head. _A little further,_ I gestured. 

Nash nodded. _Right._

So we snuck patiently up to and around the next corner . . . and arrived outside a familiar carven door. I could hear someone's feet shuffling against stone on the other side. _Hell. In there?_

So we had three choices—attack whoever was inside the room headlong (assuming I could remember how to get the door open), wait out here and ambush them when they came out, or sneak on past and hope that Sasarai was somewhere else. I didn't like any of those possibilities, but the first was the least bad, because at least if we chose it, we wouldn't have to wait and guess about what was in there. 

_Get the others,_ I signaled to Queen. She nodded and began tiptoeing back. 

_There?_ Nash suggested, pointing back at an alcove we had just passed. I shrugged. It would do. 

"Mind telling me what's behind that door?" the blond spy whispered in my ear as we stood together in the shadows, waiting, with our backs to a stone wall. 

I shrugged. "Possibly a Sindar device for detecting the locations of the True Runes, which may or may not still work." 

"'Possibly'?" 

"Let's just say that I'd rather rely on information brokered by that Calerian fruit merchant than on what the True Lightning Rune tells me without my asking it," I muttered back. 

I could see Nash putting bits and pieces together in his head. "Explains why Hikusaak would be using an area this remote as a base of operations, doesn't it?" 

I nodded, and gestured for silence as I heard the whisper of a footfall. A moment later, Queen and the others came around the last bend. 

Once again, I gave my orders with my hands and not my mouth. _Damn good thing that Joker came up with this code . . ._ Queen, Ace, and I, with our short-range weapons, would go in first, then Nash and Joker, who was already preparing a spell, and the archers would come last and flatten themselves against the wall on either side of the door. It wasn't anything we hadn't done a hundred times, but I went over it carefully, trying to make sure that Nash understood. 

_Don't leave anything to chance, do you?_ the blond spelled slowly with his hands after I was done. 

I shrugged. _Not if I can help it._

Then we were standing in front of the door, which I examined minutely, trying to remember my dream. _Like this, I think, and this . . ._

The door opened. _Showtime,_ I thought as I stepped forward. 

"I was wondering when you would get here, Geddoe." 

He was standing beside the plinth at the center of the room, with his right hand resting lightly on it. As far as I could tell, he wasn't armed . . . except for the True Runes he bore, one on his hand, the other on his forehead. That was more than enough, especially since the Circle Rune was flickering fitfully, as though he'd half-invoked it. The True Wind Rune, containerized, rested on the plinth itself, and the far wall was lit, showing twenty-three distinct True Rune locations and one mess that had to be the overlapping symbols for the four True Runes in this room. 

Hikusaak . . . looked less like King right now than I would have imagined, and not just because he'd discarded his staff and his headband. Somehow he'd managed, in the short time he'd been away from us, to grow his hair out to mid-back- length—or maybe longer. He'd braided it, so it was hard to tell for sure. There were more subtle differences, too, like a slightly crooked nose— _broken and then set without a rune to help,_ I decided. _I guess he must have used the Circle Rune to adjust his appearance before so that he looked more like Sasarai._ I knew it was possible to do that with the True Runes, although I'd never listened to Wyatt's explanations of how with more than half an ear. 

"Sorry if we're late," Ace said from behind me. "You kind of forgot to give us your new address." 

"I apologize for that," Hikusaak said. "I was in a bit of a hurry at the time." He had an accent, too, faint but distinct. _Aronian, probably. Guess that's why "King" didn't talk much—he was afraid he'd slip up._

"That supposed to excuse killing a man?" Joker asked. 

"I regret that," our enemy admitted, "but shortening his life by a few years was better than risking my plan. Surely you understand." Although it was Joker that he'd been responding to, his eyes hadn't wavered from my face. It was like, to him, the two of us were the only real people in the room. 

"On an excuse-rating scale of one to ten, I think I give that a two." I could tell by the way Ace said that that he was waving his hands as he spoke. 

"It _is_ pretty weak," Queen said. 

Hikusaak sighed. "This _is_ when I'm traditionally supposed to give the Generic Villain's Speech about what I think I'm doing and why, isn't it?" Then he frowned for a moment, and sweat broke out on his forehead, as though he were fighting some kind of internal battle. The Circle Rune flared brighter for a moment, then subsided. "I don't think I'm going to bother, though. If you die here, explaining will just waste my time, and if you live, you can talk to Sasarai about it." He waved his left hand in the general direction of one particular corner of the room, where a bundle—a smallish person, tied up—lay on the floor facing the wall. "If I thought there was any chance of persuading you to join me, Captain, I might reconsider, but . . ." He shrugged. 

So did I. "I like the world the way it is," I said, which probably went straight over the heads of everyone except him and me—and maybe Sasarai, assuming he was conscious. 

"I thought you might. True Lightning does seem to be drawn to slightly chaotic personalities. Well, then." 

Hikusaak clapped his hands sharply, and suddenly there were sixteen of him filling the room, some of them overlapping. In that instant, I understood why it had been so long since he had bothered with physical weapons. 

Hikusaak was a sorcerer, someone who didn't share the magical restrictions of normal rune users like me. We'd fought sorcerers before, mind you—Luc and his girlfriend came to mind—but they'd been young. Apprentices. Not someone old enough to have taught Crowley and his ilk. 

_Damn._ If I'd ever thought this was going to be easy . . . well, let's just say that I'd changed my mind.


	14. Chapter 14

"Nice trick—but not very effective," Nash said as he finally unwrapped his bundle, throwing the covering across the room. It passed through two Hikusaaks along the way, and I marked those two down as "not real"—then they all moved, and I wasn't sure which two they had been. "I didn't want to use this, but if I have to . . ." 

It took me a moment to figure out what he was holding—I'd read a couple of different descriptions of the thing, but they'd outright contradicted each other in a couple of places, and neither of them, for some reason, had said anything as simple as "a veeery long sword, made in sections which are bound together by some sort of thin cable". _So that's Grosser Fluss._ Bizarre and nasty. 

Nash flicked his wrist and cut a half-dozen illusions apart . . . or tried to. His eyes widened briefly in surprise, then narrowed, as there turned out to be something solid under more than one of the illusions. 

Joker swore in heartfelt tones. "Careful, everyone— he's summoned something. A _lot_ of somethings." 

All the Hikusaaks smiled. 

"So we get rid of all the extras," Ace said, stepping forward to engage the nearest Hikusaak. "And when we've got only one solid one left, we've found the real one." 

"Or we've got one less problem," Queen agreed, picking an opponent of her own. 

I found myself with two of the bastards (plus one pure illusion, but I figured out what it was early on and ignored it thereafter). Fortunately, one of them was something slow and stupid that carried a heavy weapon I could hear whistling through the air—a bone soldier, maybe. The other was nasty, though—an azoddess, maybe, or something else that could use Pale Gate spells. After it hit me with one of those, I attacked it relentlessly to avoid giving it the time to cast again, and ended up driving it slowly backward around the room. 

It was a chaotic fight, with no way to tell which of our opponents were real and which just images, and the archers were almost useless because they had to be careful not to take shots that would end up hitting one of us if their original target turned out to be not really there. I couldn't even tell how many creatures each of us was actually fighting—Nash, for instance, seemed to be facing four or five opponents, but I couldn't tell how many of them were real. Most of the others seemed to have two or three, including Joker, who had given up on casting and waded in with his fists. Aila, on the other hand, had put her bow away in favour of casting spells. Great Blessing repaired the damage I'd taken from that Pale Gate spell, Battle Oath brought an unexpected surge of strength to my arm, and then Canopy Defense settled around me in a magic-negating light show that made things even more confusing for a few moments. It was almost instantly burned away by a multi-target fire spell, though. _Hikusaak's still in the room, then—good._ It had to have been him—monsters don't think that tactically. 

Still, there wasn't anything I could _do_ about Hikusaak until my azodess finally went down. I hated to think what was hidden under the illusion—since I'd been fighting blind, I'd probably hacked her to pieces. That left me fighting a bone soldier and an illusion, and as I've already mentioned, bone soldiers are dead slow, so I had time to look around. 

Nash really was fighting four at once, and I thought that only one of them was a complete illusion. Joker, Ace, and Queen had two each. That left three Hikusaaks apparently standing in a corner doing nothing. I figured that one of those had to be the real one, so I started backing my bone soldier over in that direction. I backed it through one of the stationary Hikusaaks, then two . . . swiped with Geese at the third, and nearly fell over when she didn't make contact with anything. _What the—they're all fake? Then where—_

The thought was interrupted by a sudden wave of agony that started in my right hand, then rolled up over my entire body. Lightning crackled over my skin. _Shit, the True Rune . . . damn, that hurts . . ._ I gritted my teeth. _Have to . . . hold on . . . won't let him suck it away from me . . . where's True Wind?_ It wasn't on the plinth anymore . . . I was losing my grip on the True Lightning Rune, could feel an invisible line of force drawing it toward an empty space near the center of the room . . . 

I didn't have time to plan an attack, or anything like that—I just threw myself at the space that my True Rune seemed to be draining into, barely feeling something that might have been a bone soldier's halberd slice into my ear and thud against my armour at the shoulder. Then my other shoulder hit something slightly yielding, and I was on the floor, trying to wrestle with someone that I couldn't see, but the horrible pain of having my True Rune stolen had stopped. And two True Rune containers, shaped sort of like globes with spikes at top and bottom, were rolling across the floor. 

Hikusaak was a better wrestler than I would have expected, and knew some really nasty things to do with his knees, but I would have been bigger and heavier even without my armour. If he hadn't been invisible, I'd have been kneeling on him with his arm twisted up behind his back in fairly short order. As it was, we were pretty evenly matched. 

"You know a lot of dirty tricks," I said in exasperation, the third time I failed to pin him because I couldn't find one of his arms quickly enough. "Not really suitable for a High Priest." 

The son of a bitch twisted like a monkey, and his knee slammed into my armour over the stomach—and even with layers of metal and padding between me and him, that wasn't pleasant. 

"I was a Hero first," came the unexpected reply. "Let me show you." 

_Wha—_

Suddenly, I wasn't in the ruin anymore, and there wasn't anyone underneath me. I scrambled to my feet. 

_Town square,_ I decided. _Somewhere in one of the older areas of central Harmonia, from the looks of those buildings._ Stone below, plaster and timber above . . . no one built that way anymore. No one was standing in my direct line of sight, but I could hear what was probably a whole bunch of people trying to be quiet somewhere over to my right. I turned slowly to bring my good eye to bear. 

People, yeah. A couple of hundred of 'em, including the kids. Probably the entire population of the town. Other than that, what I noticed most about them was the hair. Even the men wore it long and braided, and it was universally light-coloured— the darkest head I saw was about on a par with Sasarai's or Hikusaak's. 

They were all watching quietly as a short-haired man in a grey uniform cut someone down from a gibbet. Around the edges of the group were more grey uniforms, on horses. Some of them had shortbows. Others were carrying what looked like either long-hafted axes or short halberds. All of them had their weapons pointed at the crowd. A bunch more stood at the far side of the square, holding either end of a chain to which three other people were manacled. One of the prisoners was a seven- or eight-year-old girl. The one beside her was a woman, who was crying silently, tears dripping from her chin. Mother and daughter, judging from the looks of them, and the man they'd just cut down looked enough like the girl that he might've been her father. 

The first grey uniform forced his half-hanged prisoner over to a small fire that had been built not far from the gibbet, and I swallowed as I realized exactly what was going on here. Hanging, drawing, and quartering is a nasty enough form of execution to make even a hardened old mercenary feel queasy if he has to watch it. Most civilized countries don't practice it anymore, although I'd seen it once before, a long time ago, in one of the little northern city-states. 

One of the other grey uniforms had detached the little girl from the chain and was hauling her over toward the scaffold, while the one handling the first prisoner had drawn his knife and was checking the edge. Why wasn't anyone moving to stop them? Okay, so some people find executions . . . entertaining . . . but there didn't seem to be any of those in this crowd. The holiday atmosphere I'd sometimes seen under similar circumstances was missing. Instead, everyone was tense, and many were slightly greenish-looking. 

I'd seen some ugly things over the years, but a group that would force the population of a town to witness the gruesome execution of a child was beyond my experience. Geese was in my hand already, and I raised the other to fling lightning at the men in grey . . . 

. . . and then stopped. _Hoofbeats?_

As one, the riders in grey wheeled their horses and formed up facing the widest of the three streets that gave entrance to the square. 

A few moments later, three other riders drew their horses up facing them. None of these were wearing grey. To the left and right, one blonde man in blue and one redhead in green, and in the center . . . well, he looked indefinably younger, but he couldn't have been anyone else. _Hikusaak._ Standing in his stirrups and glaring at the grey riders. 

"How dare you harm these people? They've done nothing to you!" It was a cliched line, but Hikusaak delivered it with passion and sincerity. 

The grey-clad horsemen parted to let the man who'd been cutting the prisoner down through. "They're traitors." 

"The entire town?" drawled the redhead beside Hikusaak. 

"Those who weren't actively sheltering you rebels didn't act to prevent others from doing so," the executioner said. "If they don't witness the executions, someone might be tempted to become involved in similar foolishness. _Kill them!_ " 

Bowstrings snapped, the Circle Rune flared . . . and all the grey-clad men became grey indeed. 

"Must have been awkward to have all those statues blocking the entrance to the square," I said out loud. 

"We dragged them out of the way with horses," Hikusaak said quietly from behind me . . . although he was still sitting on the horse in front of me, too. "Admittedly, it took a while, but it was better than having an Aronian army detachment in town. There had already been beatings and rapes, in addition to the random executions. That family hadn't actually been sheltering anyone, but the father had protested when a junior officer tried to haul his daughter back to the barracks . . ." Suddenly, the square was empty of people. Even the Hikusaak on the horse was gone, and I slowly turned to face the one talking to me, who was saying, "They were vile—the entire military hierarchy was rotten from top to bottom, and the nobles were worse. The Harmonian Regular Army, the priesthood . . . it's all created a much better world." 

"Their being wrong doesn't make you right," I said succinctly. 

"And 'better' isn't 'best'—I know all that. But I'm doing the best I know how . . . and I can't risk giving Harmonia over to anyone else. There's too much risk of it going down the same path that Aronia did. And I'm the only one left now who remembers the warning signs." The Circle Rune flickered on Hikusaak's forehead as he looked at me with tired, haunted eyes. 

"So what happens when you're completely under the Circle Rune's control?" I asked. "It isn't human. I doubt it even cares about humans. What happens to Harmonia then?" 

Hikusaak smiled wryly. "I know it's been affecting my thinking—True Runes borne on the forehead tend to be dangerous that way. But I have it under control. Believe me. I've had five hundred years of practice in handling it." 

_Or so you want to believe._ "Get your head out of your arse and look around you," I said sharply. "Remember what happened when we got to Oerat? How about the girl in the marketplace? Or the stunts Luc pulled off during the war? The crap the Howling Voice was pulling to get at you? Harmonia's already going rotten, and I haven't seen you doing one damned thing to stop it. 'Under control.' Don't make me laugh." 

The High Priest shook his head. "I was wrong to expect you to understand. In the end, you're just a common-born mercenary." 

"Wrong. I do understand . . . that it's easy to believe that you're some kind of god when you have one of these." I held up my right hand, clenched into a fist, with the back facing him. "But in the end, we're just men, no better than anyone else . . . worse than some. The True Runes give us power, but not divine wisdom or judgement. We have no more business meddling in other people's lives than the next person does, even if we've got the ability. It's up to us to keep our actions on the human scale." 

That got me another one of those tired smiles. "You're an odd mixture of idealist and pragmatist, Captain Geddoe . . . As it happens, I disagree with you. Those of us who bear the True Runes are responsible for seeing them used properly, yes, but not using them at all is a waste, when we can benefit so many. You and I . . . as you say, we may be worse men than some others, but I think we're also better than many, and, thanks to the years we've seen, wiser than most." 

I glanced down. "I thought that way too, once upon a time . . . then I saw what happens when one of these things gets loose. The True Fire Rune didn't distinguish between its bearer's comrades and his enemies. It just killed whoever happened to be in range. After that, I decided that the only good use for a True Rune was to fight the bearer of another True Rune who thought he was entitled to meddle." 

Saying it that way probably made it sound like it had been an easy decision to reach, but it hadn't. Not even close. It had taken me fifty years to understand what I was feeling, and put it into words. Fifty years and a second war against another True Rune bearer. 

Hikusaak sighed. "Then I was right—it's impossible for us to agree. A shame. I was hoping . . . there are so few of us who survive beyond the first few years, and I've grown rather lonely . . ." 

I snorted. "Try making friends with a few ordinary people sometime. They might surprise you." 

"There was a time when I did that. Then I got tired of them dying on me. There will come a time when you'll see . . . assuming you survive the next few minutes." 

Everything went black for a second, and then I was back in the underground room we'd started from. Hikusaak didn't give me any time to orient myself before blasting me with some spell that threw me through the air so that I fetched up with a crunch against the far wall. Suddenly, I was lying on my side, and breathing hurt. _Broken ribs,_ I diagnosed—I was pretty familiar with the condition. I hugged myself with one arm and scrabbled at my belt for some medicine with the other hand. 

There was only one Hikusaak in the room now, but there were plenty of bone soldiers and other vaguely-humanoid monsters to go with him. The archers were pounding away grimly at what looked like the one remaining azoddess, while the others fought walking skeletons and floating metalwork. As I finally found the little bottle I'd been groping for and got it open, Nash knocked all six individual parts of a ghost armour that was coming at him out of the air with one flick of the wrist . . . and finished up by taking a swipe at Ace, who ended up with a red line down the side of his face when he didn't duck fast enough. 

"Hey, what the hell do you think you're doing?!" 

"No good talking to him," Joker panted. "He goes crazy when he's been using that stupid sword for too long—thinks everyone's an enemy. Just try to stay out of his way." 

"Well, shit," Ace said. "Be nice if one of you had warned us earlier." 

Hikusaak, I noted as I drank off some of the foul stuff in the bottle and waited for the pain to go out of my ribs, had recovered the empty True Rune container, and was now eyeing the one holding True Wind, which had rolled under the feet of Queen's opponent. He raised his hand, and I somehow managed to concentrate well enough through the pain of knitting bones to call lightning down on him. _Oh no you don't,_ I thought with savage satisfaction, as he scowled and abandoned whatever spell he'd been trying to cast. 

Geese was over near the center of the room, where I'd dropped her during our little wrestling match, and I threw myself at her, pushing off the wall with my legs, willing to leave a little skin on the stone of the floor if that was what it took. I rolled as my hand grasped her hilt, and fetched up in a sitting position just in time to parry the descending halberd of another bone soldier. The force with which its weapon struck mine was enough to make my newly-healed ribs creak. Then the weight went away as it began pulling up for another strike, giving me a moment to get my legs under me. To buy a little more time, I hooked the damned thing's ankle with Geese's blade and sent it over backwards, then, once I was properly on my feet, kicked its ribcage in as it struggled to bring its halberd to bear from a position it had never intended to be used from. It twitched for a moment more, then collapsed into a heap of disconnected bones. 

I looked around for Hikusaak, then had to stop and defend myself as more monsters appeared. 

_He's going to bury us,_ I thought grimly. Everyone in SFDF Unit Twelve was good—I'd never accepted anything other than the best—but this was like defending the villagers of Le Buque inside Mount Sendai during the war: unending. We might manage to deal with fifty, a hundred, _two_ hundred monsters, but sooner or later sheer exhaustion was going to start taking us down. We had to deal with Hikusaak. 

_And if I can't spare the time to look for him, I'm going to have to figure out where he_ will be _, and meet him there._ He was trying to get the True Wind Rune, which had been practically under Queen's feet the last time I'd seen it, so I started working my way over in her direction, kicking bones and armour out of my path. 

At first, it looked like I might even make it in time, but then three ghost armours piled onto Queen at once, and she went down. I'd never in my life moved so fast before as I did while I was trying to get her out from under that pile of malevolent metal. Joker'd had much the same reaction, and was pounding on arms made of bone and metal, trying to keep them off me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ace trying to do the same for the archers, who were, in turn, doing the best they could to help the rest of us, although their weapons weren't suited to handling most of the creatures we were now facing. A little further away, Nash stood in the eye of a hurricane of monsters, Grosser Fluss flickering around him too quickly for me to be able to get a good look at it. 

When I found Queen at the bottom of the pile, she looked pale and dazed and there was blood trickling down the side of her face, but she was clearly alive, and even conscious, because she gave me a weak shadow of her normal sarcastic smile. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned around, deciding that it was time to take my turn keeping the hordes at bay so that Joker could bring a few healing spells to bear . . . 

I barely even noticed the crunch under my feet when it happened—I mean, there were bits of bone soldier all over the floor, and at first I just thought I'd stepped on one of them. I figured out that I'd been wrong when something flashed, all the monsters stopped dead, and one of the bone soldiers I'd been about to engage turned into Hikusaak, who had a thunderous expression on his face. 

"You damned fool," he said. It was only then that I realized I was standing on the shards of an empty True Rune container, and the flash had been the True Wind Rune running off somewhere to sulk, or find a new host, or whatever disgruntled True Runes do when they're released from confinement. 

I shrugged. "You shouldn't leave anything that important just lying around." 

Hikusaak opened his mouth to say something else . . . then, after a clear struggle, got his temper under control and called up another wave of monsters instead. And disappeared into them. 

_This isn't going to work,_ I thought as I dove in and started sending more bones and armour-bits flying. "Withdraw!" The word came out sounding kind of hoarse, so I repeated it. Once we were back out in the hallway, we could take turns holding the door until Hikusaak got tired of this . . . 

"Boss, Nash can't hear you," Joker said from somewhere off to my left. "Not while he's using that thing." 

I swore and kicked the legs out from under another bone soldier. "Jacques, shoot Nash in the wrist," I snapped. "Get that sword out of his hand. Joker, be ready to step in to make sure he doesn't get mowed down while he's recovering." 

"Right," Joker said. 

Jacques sounded grimmer. "I'll try, but he's moving awfully fast. I may not be able to hit him." 

"We can do it," Aila said. "Get ready." 

I couldn't spare the time to look back over my shoulder, so I took on another ghost armour and hoped that they knew what they were doing. 

"Got him!" Aila shouted excitedly a few seconds later. 

"Let's move," Ace said. 

"I don't think so." Hikusaak still sounded irritable. I just wished I could tell which of the creatures facing me was him, so that I could give him something to be irritated about. "This ends now." 

The monsters started coming at us in a wave again. They kept coming even after I'd reduced a couple of them to disconnected parts on the floor, and there were just so bloody _many_ of them . . . I started backing up, one slow step at a time, until I could feel my shoulders pressing against the wall and realized that I couldn't go any further, and there were a half- dozen ghost armours crowding in closer and closer to me—not attacking, just hemming me in until I couldn't swing Geese anymore . . . until I couldn't move at all. Me, or any of the others, who seemed to have gotten pretty much the same treatment . . . the ones I could see, anyway. Ace had to be on my blind side, because he wasn't part of the visible line-up. Queen, I noted, still looked a little dazed, and I hoped she was okay. Nash, on the other hand, seemed to be pretty much himself again, and was eyeing Grosser Fluss, now lying abandoned in the middle of the floor, with a mixture of irritation and regret. 

One of the bone soldiers reached down and picked the weapon up . . . and became Hikusaak. 

"It's been a long time since I last saw this," he said, hefting it. "I'd heard that there was someone in the present generation of Latkjes who had taught himself how to use it, but you're better with it than I would have expected. Maelor would be proud. You look quite a lot like him, actually, except for the hair." 

"Sorry about that," Nash said, "but my ancestors did go to a lot of trouble to breed the red-headed strain out of the family. Took them nearly four hundred years." 

_I'll be damned,_ I thought. I hadn't noticed at the time, but the redhead who'd been riding with Hikusaak in his little illusiory history lesson _had_ looked a bit like Nash. 

Hikusaak snorted and made a broad, sloppy movement with Grosser Fluss that still somehow managed to bring the pieces back together so that it looked almost like an ordinary sword. Then he bent down and laid it back on the floor. 

"Enough of that," he said, straightening up and walking over to stand in front of me. "I suppose I'll have to transfer the True Lightning Rune to Sasarai for a while—not what I would have preferred, but he's at least more tractable than you, and it will sever his bond with True Earth completely." 

"I'm not going to give it to you," I said. 

"I didn't expect you to . . . but I don't need your cooperation." 

"If you could take it away from me that easily, you wouldn't have been fooling around with the True Wind Rune." 

"I don't believe I ever claimed it would be easy," Hikusaak said. "But the True Runes are not all equal in power, and the Circle Rune is one of the strongest. Eventually, it and I will be able to wrest True Lightning away from you . . . although it would take far less effort if we had the support of another True Rune." 

I glared at him. "Over my dead body." 

"I did consider arranging that . . . but I can't predict what True Lightning would do if I killed you. It might jump to someone leaving the city, or dive deep into the earth and remain there for centuries. The True Runes are thinking beings—capable of planning and of forming alliances, and possessed of their own sets of likes and dislikes. And the Circle Rune has regrettably never seemed to be well-liked by its siblings." 

My mouth twitched. "Funny—I thought you said you weren't going to do the Standard Villain Speech and explain yourself to us." 

Hikusaak shrugged. "Tradition is a form of order, and the Circle Rune is an embodiment of order. It's often easier for me to go along with it than to fight it." 

_And the world will end in grey._

"It truly is a shame that we could not have met five hundred years ago, Geddoe. If we had, I think that perhaps we would have been friends." 

And maybe we even would have. The young Hero Hikusaak might've been someone I could have respected. Maybe. Neither of us would ever know now. 

Then the Circle Rune flared, and it was time to fight again. 

I don't know how long I stood there with my back pressed up against the wall and sparks crackling over my body, forcing myself to concentrate past the pain, to hold on to the True Lightning Rune. It seemed like forever, but I'd bet it wasn't really any more than ten minutes—probably less. Then the agony suddenly just stopped, and I had attention to spare for little things like the fact that I would have liked those damned ghost armours to ease up a little so that I could wipe away the sweat that was trying to trickle down into my eye, or at least take the much deeper breaths that my body wanted. 

Hikusaak had turned slightly, and whatever he was looking at right now wasn't me. Well, I could still move my head, at least, so I did. 

Knight Class Gunner Kalith was standing in the open doorway, holding the Stone Crow securely in both hands with its muzzle pointed at Hikusaak, but not attempting to shoot—my guess was that Hikusaak had blocked her first shot, at the cost of his concentration on me, and she was now trying to decide what to do next. I didn't have time to worry about her, though—I had to come up with some way out of this mess. 

Difficult to come up with a useful plan when you couldn't move much of anything below the neck, though. _I suppose I could try to make him lose his temper and kill me by telling him what I really think of him . . ._ but he'd be more likely just to knock me unconscious, so that wasn't much more workable than trying to glare him to death. 

My right hand tingled. 

I frowned. _Trying to tell me something, are you? I'm not sure I should even bother to try to listen—you're what got me into this mess._

Tingle. 

_All right, all right, it isn't as though I have anything better to do._

I closed my eye and tried to relax and let the ghost armours take my weight—damned things had to be useful for something, right? Still, even though a soldier—especially a mercenary—has to learn how to will himself to sleep whenever there's a chance to get some, falling into a doze while standing up and surrounded by enemies wasn't easy. At least the others' attention was probably on Hikusaak and Kalith rather than me, so they wouldn't be wondering what in hell I thought I was doing. 

The line between dreaming and not-dreaming wasn't as clear this time as it normally was—there was a period during which I saw a dreamscape through the eye that wasn't there anymore and the red of light shining through the inside of my eyelid with my good eye, but that gradually went away as I concentrated on the dream. 

_The Grasslands, half a century ago,_ I thought as I looked around—I even sort of remembered what we'd called this little hollow in the hillside just above a stream. It was late evening, and the area was spangled with campfires—the old Fire Bringer, taking a break from their hit-and-run campaign against Harmonia. And it didn't take me more than an instant to figure all that out, because I recognized the two figures sprawled on the ground beside the nearest fire: me and Wyatt Lightfellow. 

My younger self glanced at the fire and the pot balanced over it on a rough tripod, and said, "If he doesn't get back soon, this is going to get cold." 

Wyatt grunted agreement, but didn't bother to look up from the notebook he was studying. 

"You still trying to figure that out?" the other me asked. 

This time, my old friend—although I doubt we'd actually known each other all that long when this conversation had originally taken place, since the other me still had both eyes, meaning that this had been early in the campaign—did look up. "I didn't really have much time to study it when I copied it down . . . and besides, I can read more of the Sindar glyphs if I just sort of stare at them and let my mind drift than I can if I concentrate and try to use what I consciously know about them. Surely you've noticed the same thing." 

"What do you mean?" The other me turned his head away, staring into the fire. 

"That the True Runes have their own memories that are separate from ours, but still accessible to us if we're willing to listen for them. Funny, I'd have thought you'd have figured that out—you've had True Lightning longer than I've been alive. Hasn't it ever tried to talk to you?" 

"Maybe." The other me tossed a handful of grass into the fire, then added with apparent reluctance, "Sometimes I dream . . ." 

Wyatt chuckled. "Funny, with that idealistic streak of yours, I wouldn't have expected you to be so hard-headed. You're a strange man, Geddoe. You say you believe in humanity, so why do you find it so hard to trust?" 

What in hell was this, and why did True Lightning think it was of any use to me now? 

"This isn't a human being," the other me was pointing out while holding up his right hand. "It doesn't have a human's needs or purposes . . . so no, I don't entirely trust it. Do you trust True Water?" 

"Weirdly enough, I do. It chose to come to me. I can only assume that it did so because it wanted a human partner—if it hadn't, it could have stayed with that statue I found it on for another millennium or two, or headed down into the ground, or even incarnated itself and poked around that way. I don't think it would want to harm me—in fact, I suspect that it'd like to make me happy, or why else would it follow my orders?" 

The other me snorted and flopped down on his back in the grass. "This sounds like part of your we're-potential- sorcerers theory." 

Wyatt shrugged. "A sorcerer is just someone who's synchronized so deeply with a rune, or a bunch of runes, that he can draw out more of their powers than an ordinary rune-user. For most people, that takes a lot of work on top of natural aptitude, but for us . . . well, the True Runes are sentient in their own right, and I think they're trying to synchronize with us, to meet us halfway—that's why they talk to us. So it isn't just that the three of us could become sorcerers . . . if any of us lives long enough, I think it's inevitable. Hell, we may even become something more." 

_More?_

"You've been reading that Sindar stuff for too long— it's scrambled your brain." 

"Maybe—or maybe I'm just plain wrong. It happens. I'm not a scholar, just a knight whose curiosity about the Sindar got him a lot more than he bargained for a few years back." 

_Damnit, Wyatt, what in hell did you mean, "more"?_ I wondered as the scene faded into darkness. If there really was a "more" then there might be a way for me to beat Hikusaak by tapping more deeply into the powers of the True Lightning Rune than he'd done with those of the Circle Rune—that he dared do, I suspected, knowing that it was trying to control him and what giving into it would mean. 

Something tugged at my right hand, and I looked down in time to watch with fascination and faint unease as the True Lightning Rune pulled its tiny dragon body all the way out of my flesh and then jumped down onto the invisible surface on which I was standing, although it was still tethered to my hand with what looked like a rope of golden light. Then it looked up at me, tilted its head to one side, and began to grow . . . ankle-high, knee-high, waist-high . . . I backed away to give it more room. It finally stopped when its eyes were precisely level with mine. 

"Is there some point to this?" I asked out loud. 

The dragon snorted, making purple flame flicker around its nostrils for a moment, and extended its forepaws as though it wanted to take my hand. 

"You're offering me that 'more' Wyatt was talking about," I said slowly, and it nodded. _Question is, at what cost?_

The dragon raised one paw and drew a claw across its throat. 

"It'll kill me?" 

The dragon shrugged. _Maybe,_ I translated. 

"Have you ever done this before?" 

Headshake. 

"Great. After this, I think I'm going to retire from the heroing business." _Especially,_ I reflected as I extended my hands, _because it's making me start to sound a little too much like Ace._

The dragon's hands joined with mine— 

—I felt a searing pain inside my head— 

—and I was back in the underground room, with the ghost armours pressed against my front and sides, and the wall at my back, but it felt like I was still trapped inside a dream. Or a nightmare. I hurt all the way down to my bones, a vicious pain that was easily ten times worse than what I'd felt a few moments ago when Hikusaak had been trying to pull my True Rune out of me, and my vision was weirdly distorted. Hikusaak looked like he had a third eye, white and shining and perfectly round—or sometimes it was a little blue-eyed white dragon sprouting from his forehead. The ghost armours and bone soldiers had tendrils of light holding them together—the ones crammed up against me were shaking as little lightning bolts jumped from my body and tore at those tendrils. And there was a flickering distortion growing out of my face that sometimes looked like a dragon's muzzle. 

"Boss, you okay?" 

I ignored that, and with my mind, and the power that was torturing me, I shoved the bone soldiers away. It was as simple, and as indescribable, as moving my hand—although, I noted in a hazy sort of way as bits of armour slammed into the far wall, it was hard to gauge force. 

Then I distinctly felt my heart skip a beat. _Not much time—this is killing me!_ Hikusaak was right in front of me, and I could feel him try to attack me with magic, but his spell . . . well, it didn't slide off, or bounce, and I don't think I absorbed it, exactly, but it didn't seem to have any effect, either. 

Geese was still in my hand, and I focused my power along her blade as I staggered three steps forward. Another spell slammed into me as I finished with a parody of a lunge, but again, it didn't do much—there was a flash that half-blinded me, but I could feel Geese's point penetrating flesh and her edge scraping along ribs. 

I kept on pushing until her crosspiece was pressing against Hikusaak's chest—actually, kept on pushing longer than that, carrying us both over and onto the floor. When we finally came to rest, Geese had been pushed partway out of his torso again, and her bloody, blackened edge was mere inches from my nose. I was panting for breath, but couldn't seemed to get any, and I was cold and tired and still hurt more than I ever had before in my life. 

_Well, at least that's over,_ I thought as blackness crashed down over me.


	15. Chapter 15

When I woke up, I thought I was dead and had gone on to some kind of (disappointing, admittedly) afterlife, and not just because I hadn't ever expected to wake up again. No, the clincher, as far as I was concerned, was the fact that I could see out of both eyes, although what I was seeing was just a chunk of rather boring white-painted ceiling. 

Then I came a little more awake and realized that I was still wearing my eyepatch—I could feel the light pressure of the strap across my forehead and the patch itself brushing my cheekbone. _The hell . . . ?_ Somehow, I was seeing _through_ it. And yet my left hand, when I lifted it up in front of my face, was still gloved, and neither the hand nor the glove seemed in the least transparent. Weird, not to mention inconsistent. 

I decided to take a better look around, and sat up. _Okay, medium-sized room. Not underground for a change, 'cause there's a window. Furniture . . . hmmm._ The bed I was lying in was bigger than those in most inns, and there was a desk, and a wardrobe, and a washstand with a mirror on the wall above it, and a couple of chairs. Nothing interesting on the walls, just white paint. The curtains were a utilitarian shade of grey, as were the blankets I was lying under, but there was a small rag rug beside the bed to lend the place a splash of colour. Cheap soft furnishings and expensive, well-made wood . . . _If I had to guess, I'd say that I'm the guest of some nobleman who's down on his luck, which I guess makes about as much sense as anything._

Whoever had put me to bed had stripped off my armour, boots, and swordbelt, but the boots were beside the bed and Geese was hanging from the bedpost, scabbard and all. _And my armour's probably inside the wardrobe, so I'm not a prisoner._

I leaned over and snagged the hilt of my sword so that I could draw her and have a look at her blade—she'd been quite a mess the last time I'd seen her, sticking out of Hikusaak. Clean, yes, and sharpened back to a good edge, but there were black marks right up where her hilt and blade joined, as though she'd been in a fire and someone hadn't quite been able to get all the char off. _Which means that it probably wasn't all a dream._

_No, it wasn't. Of course it hadn't been._

The thought seemed . . . subtly off somehow. I raised my right hand to rub at my forehead, but I hadn't quite touched it yet when there was an odd throbbing in the socket where my right eye used to be, and I was suddenly seeing the mark of the True Lightning Rune glowing _inside_ my flesh. 

I closed that eye, and the glow vanished. Opened it, and it came back. 

"This is your fault somehow, isn't it?" I said, out loud, to the True Rune. 

The answer came back as more of a feeling than words or even images—it had tried to fix my eye while I was unconscious, but hadn't gotten it quite right, and it was sorry. 

I snorted. _So let's see exactly what you_ did _do,_ I thought, flipped the patch up onto my forehead, and headed for the mirror above the washstand. 

I took one look and flipped it back down again, for my peace of mind as well as everyone else's, because what I'd seen hadn't been an eye _or_ an empty socket—more like a hole filled with lightning-shot blackness that gave the illusion of infinite depth, like I was seeing through my own head and into . . . I don't know what, really, except that it was disturbing and I didn't like it. On the other hand, I had my peripheral vision and my depth perception back, which probably made it worth it so long as I didn't take the patch off. I wasn't sure how I felt about being able to see implanted runes—the Thunder Rune in my left hand and the Killer Rune on my forehead were fainter than True Lightning, but visible when I looked for them—but it might come in handy sometime. The patch, as it turned out, wasn't really transparent either—it turned opaque again if I pulled it a little away from my face. Close in, though, my new "eye" seemed to be able to see through anything but my own flesh. _Which might have some interesting applications with sealed documents . . . but you should still stick to blowing things up and not healing from now on,_ I told True Lightning, and got a feeling of embarrassed agreement back. 

Deciding that I'd been playing with the damned thing for long enough, I stamped into my boots, took my armour out of the wardrobe and put it on, belted on Geese, and set off to find someone who could tell me where I was and what was going on. 

Out in the hallway, my boots whispered on the threadbare carpet as I headed toward the staircase I could see not far away. The sounds of conversation were coming up from below, although at first I could only make out a word here and there. 

"Found him . . . knee-deep . . . fountain . . . six thieves . . . said . . . needed to wash up . . . poor puppy'd never . . . that drunk before," Joker was saying as I got to the bottom. "Guess they only serve them wine in the Temple Guard." 

Laughter—mostly Ace's, from the sound of it. 

"Damn it, Wang, you're ruining my concentration," Nash said. He sounded embarrassed. 

More laughter. 

"Just be glad he didn't know you when you were a little kid," Queen was saying as I finally found the right room and stepped through the door. 

It was a dining room, or maybe more like a banquet hall, because it was clearly intended to seat thirty-odd. The near end of the table was groaning under the weight of a couple of dozen bottles and one pair of boots—Ace's—and he, Queen, and Joker had clearly been helping themselves to as much of what those bottles contained as they could hold. A little further down, Nash was playing chess with Sasarai, who, other than being too thin and dressed in ordinary clothes and not his uniform, looked less the worse for wear than I would have expected—although the fact that he had the True Earth Rune back might have had something to do with that. I could see it burning inside his hand as he reached out to make a move. Aila and Jacques were at the far end, talking quietly and fletching arrows. 

"I hope there's some more left where those came from," I said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the bottles. 

"Boss! You're— _whoa!_ " Or something like that—Ace isn't all that coherent when he's falling over backwards because he's forgotten he has his feet up. "Ouch!" he added as he disentangled himself from his chair. "Damnit, there's carpet in all the rest of this place—you'd think they could have managed a little in here, too." 

"Most people prefer not to have carpet in the dining room—too difficult to get the crumbs out," Queen said, rising to her feet a bit more successfully than Ace had. "Just a second, and I'll get you a glass, Captain." 

I nodded, glanced around, and decided to take the empty chair at the head of the table. Or maybe it was the foot— I've never been sure exactly how you're supposed to tell which is which, but then I've never much cared, either. 

"Fill me in," I ordered. 

"Well, first of all, we're under house arrest, along with His Holiness there," Ace said, waving one hand in Sasarai's direction, "until they can ask the other bishops what to do with us. So we're stuck in Oerat for a while longer." 

"Could be worse, though," Joker added. "A couple of them were talking about locking us in the dungeon under the old palace at first, but then Dios reminded them that Sasarai might get reinstated, and we were friends of his, so they've put us in one of the houses the governor uses for guests he doesn't particularly like and set a bunch of guards around the outside." 

"And they probably don't have much confidence in those dungeons right now, anyway," Queen added, plunking an empty glass down in front of me. I grabbed her wrist before I could stop myself, staring at the white-green light that now burned inside her right hand. _Oh, Queen . . ._ I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be sad, angry, or even . . . grateful? 

"Sorry," I muttered, and let her go. 

"Guess you haven't quite recovered yet," she said sympathetically as she sat back down beside me. "That's hardly surprising—you've been unconscious for almost two days, and at first we thought we were going to lose you completely. It took three Mother Oceans and I don't know how many other healing spells to get your heart working properly again. I guess frying people from the inside out with lightning spells isn't a good idea, even if it's effective." 

Hikusaak really was dead then. Good. I sloshed some brandy into my glass and leaned back in my chair to drink. "The Circle Rune?" 

"It's disappeared," Sasarai said. "It may have fled into the ground, or migrated to someone on the street above. Unfortunately, until the Council reinstates me, I can't order a search . . . and even then, it will have to be done very quietly. We can't afford to make the High Priest's death public knowledge—if we did, we would lose our authority." 

"But at the same time, it doesn't matter if the rest of us blab about it," Nash added. "He's been rumoured dead for so long that without official endorsement, everyone'll just assume this is more of the same. Which means they'll probably let us go instead of quietly executing us." 

"He's been saying cheerful things like that ever since they brought us here," Ace added with a glare. "I don't know why Joker didn't drown him while they were in Unit Three together." 

"Well, he was kind of cute back then," Joker said. "He really did remind me of a puppy—eager and friendly and with no idea how to handle himself out on the frontier—and he didn't stick around long enough for me to realize how much of a nuisance he could be." 

"One more word, and I'll tell them all that story that Captain Alzen told me about you, the Lizard, and the Duck," Nash said threateningly. 

Joker snorted. "A couple of them have already heard it." 

"A Lizard and a Duck," Ace said thoughtfully. "Oh, that one! Hadn't realized it was about you, old man." He snickered. "Did you really . . . their tails . . . oh, damn." He was laughing too hard to say much else, after that . . . well, until a book sailed through the far door and hit him in the forehead. 

"Could you fools keep it down?" Dios said, appearing in that doorway with another book under his arm. "Some of us are trying to read. Oh, Captain Geddoe—my felicitations on your recovery." 

I nodded to him, although I was kind of busy keeping an eye on Joker to make sure that he didn't drown from snickering too hard into his drink. 

"Hikusaak said that you could explain what he thought he was trying to do," I prompted Sasarai when I was sure that my entire troop was going to live. 

The Bishop grimaced. "I understand the most important parts, I think. He was trying to create a new power base for himself here—to wrest this province out of the Council's control, and use it to raise an army. I think he was also hoping for several clones equipped with whatever True Runes he could scrounge. Then he would have used Iddaran to take back Harmonia. It would have taken years, of course, but he believed he had the time—he refused to let himself see just how badly the Circle Rune was eating away at his mind." 

That made sense, sort of, which left, "What happened to our friend from the Howling Voice?" as the question most on my mind. 

"Vanished after dealing with Hikusaak's leftover monsters," Nash said. "I'm not really surprised—they train their operatives not to stick around and face the music. She's probably halfway back to the Tower by now." 

"You should be a little more grateful, you know," Ace said. "It isn't every day that a beautiful woman rescues you from a bunch of ghost armours." 

"I don't have nearly enough beautiful women rescuing me from anything," Nash admitted with a grin. "Still, even if my Missus was willing to overlook it, that's one relationship that I know wouldn't go anywhere." 

"If I were that 'Missus' of yours, I wouldn't let you have nearly such a long leash," Queen drawled, swirling her glass. "A gal has to keep an eye on men like you, if she doesn't want them to go wandering off." 

There were other questions I wanted to ask, of course, but not while Sasarai was in the room, so I just drank and listened to Ace and Nash trade stories about Joker, while Joker tried to get back at them by telling some stories of his own . . . but of course, there were two of them and only one of him. Queen, after she'd drunk a bit more, started scoring the stories on a scale of one to ten—I think Nash was ahead by several points by the end, with Ace trailing hopelessly, but I really wasn't paying much attention. The storytelling seemed to distract Nash from his chess game, though, because Sasarai won, then excused himself from the table. _Guess we were just a bit too much for him,_ I thought, gazing into my glass. Aila and Jacques vanished at some point, too, after Sasarai, but before Nash staggered off and, from the sound of things, kind of fell up the stairs, and definitely before Ace hit the table face-first and Joker leaned back in his chair and started snoring. That left just me and Queen, and when she drained her glass and put it to one side, I had a feeling I knew part of what she was going to say. 

"You know, don't you?" She held up her right hand as she said it. "I won't ask how." 

"And there's no point in my asking why," I sort of agreed. 

"I don't know if there is or not." Her voice was quiet, thoughtful. "I saw your foot coming down, and I . . . tried to will the True Wind Rune to me, sort of. I don't know if that made a difference or not." 

I stared at her. _You willed . . . why?_

And she knew me well enough to know what I wasn't asking, because she answered the question. "I knew that, if it didn't come to me, it might choose almost anyone . . . and these past few years, I've seen too many True-Rune-bearers doing stupid, crazy things to feel entirely comfortable with that. I didn't want us to end up having to chase down another immortal, tremendously powerful nutcase. And . . ." 

I waited—I thought she deserved all the time she needed to find the right words. 

"I've been watching you for three years now, knowing," she said slowly. "I can't say that I really know all that much about what you've been through—not yet, anyway—but . . . I don't think you deserve to be so much alone, and I don't think it's good for you, either. To be honest, one of the reasons that Hikusaak scared me shitless is that there were some things about him that reminded me of you. You need someone who understands everything to help you keep touch with what's real, and the other people who could have done that for you are gone. I can't claim that I don't understand why they went their own way—they wanted to go back home, but for me, Sanady's gone, and all the home I have left is with the Twelfth Unit. And . . ." 

"Another 'and'?" I teased gently, to keep from showing how I was feeling. 

"This is the last one, I promise," she said, smiling wryly. "And . . . well. The world's changed a lot in the five hundred years that Hikusaak's been around. More than once, these past couple of months, I've been wondering what it's going to be like another five hundred years from now. Maybe now I'll have the chance to see, and if I don't make it, at least I'll have tried. So . . . some of it was for you, and some of it was for me, and some of it was just because I was pissed off at people like Luc and Hikusaak and Yuber. And now that I've got the damned thing, I'm not going to give it up. Satisfied?" 

I didn't answer her directly. Instead, I picked up the bottle that held the last of the brandy and divided it between our two (empty) glasses. Then, setting the bottle aside, I offered her a toast. 

"Here's to the future," I said, and winked. 

She laughed. "Right. The future." 

So we finished the liquor and staggered up to bed, leaning on each other.


	16. Epilogue

After that, we ended up spending another month in Oerat while Sasarai, the garrison commander, the governor, and the Council sent letters back and forth, and we probably would have been there a lot longer if they hadn't eventually resorted to sending them by bird. In the end, Sasarai was provisionally reinstated and our part in the whole business was quietly swept under the nearest rug, which suited us just fine. 

We did get one interesting visitor during our enforced holiday, though: Landon, who showed up with a letter of his own the day after I woke up. It was from Hilde, and addressed on the outside to "Capt. Geddoe, #12, HSFDF", but inside to "Prince Geddoe ea Iddaran", and some of the rest of what it said . . . well, I wasn't sure whether a more expressive man would have laughed, cried, or run out of the building in a rage to find the sender and stuff it down her throat. Queen read part of it over my shoulder—I think she managed to get as far as the bit about the rebellion's intent to instate a Council of Regency on my behalf when they won before the tears that were forcing themselves out because she was laughing so hard made it impossible for her to continue. 

We did send a reply, after I'd burned the damned thing—a short one, consisting of "Good luck," Queen's signature, and a postscript that I added to the effect that if she ever sent us anything of the sort again, _I_ was going to send her and Olor a shipment of troll dragons. 

I won't describe the state Landon ended up in after he'd finished "celebrating" his promotion to journeyman with Ace, either—you can probably guess. 

There were a few other loose ends, but not many. As far as I know, Hikusaak's surviving goons are still in prison—there weren't nearly as many of them as we'd thought, and the rebels had given a lot of them sore heads. The report that Ace sent back to Headquarters—and dutifully copied for Kiraym—was a work of art, and exactly as truthful as it had to be, which wasn't very. 

Of course, Headquarters wanted to talk to us in person, so once the authorities in Oerat turned us loose, we ended up slogging back to Caleria in more of the same wet winter weather. That actually turned out to have the nastiest consequences of the whole business: Ace caught a cold along the way, and the final climb up out of the forest and into the mountains made it worse. By the time we actually hit Caleria, he was in rotten shape and it was obvious that, although we all knew he'd pull through eventually, he wasn't going to be doing much travelling for a couple of months. After we all talked it over, Joker decided to stay in Caleria to keep an eye on him, Aila took Jacques with her on an extended visit to the Karaya Clan, and Queen and I accepted a small-scale mission that required us to take ship from Vinay del Zexay. 

The ship hit a storm a few days later, and we spent a couple of days running before the wind before some idiot sea serpent showed up and managed to mess up the hull before we finished turning it into snake steaks. The crew'd already taken to the lifeboats—and gotten themselves eaten for it—so we cut the cover for the cargo hatch loose to use as a raft . . . and that's how we ended up floating where you picked us up, wherever that was—hard to tell, since I don't know exactly where we are now, beyond "some little speck of rock somewhere in the Island Nations Federation". 

So that's our story. It's your turn now, Lazlo. 

So you're saying you don't know where you got that True Rune in your left hand, and that those swords you've got propped in the corner are just for decoration? Didn't think so. It's pretty obvious that you've been some kind of fighter, even if that was a while ago. A _long_ while, I'd guess . . . there were still a few stories when I was a kid about the Island Nations War, and some nameless knight-apprentice who helped run the thing, then disappeared . . . 

Yeah, take your time as much as you like. It's not like the we're going anywhere until the weather clears up again . . .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to clear up a few bits and pieces . . .
> 
> Some material on Nash and his background was taken from the Suikogaiden games, which have never received an official English translation (I worked from some summaries found on the Internet, if I remember correctly). Most other background stuff that wasn't present in Suikoden III, I just made up.
> 
> "Lazlo" is the official name of the protagonist of Suikoden IV, just in case that was insufficiently obvious.
> 
> There was going to be a sequel to this, involving Geddoe et al. being tapped as Sasarai's escort on a diplomatic mission to Falena and crossing paths with the protagonist of Suikoden V, who would have been returning home to witness his niece's wedding . . . but I only wrote a couple of pages before moving on to something else. If anyone's amused by the idea, feel free to take it and run with it, though.
> 
> My thanks to lucathia and the others who have expressed their appreciation of this work.


End file.
